To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee dies

Harper Lee, author of the bestselling novel To Kill a Mockingbird, died today in Monroeville, Ala. She was 89.

Lee, a lawyer’s daughter, was born in rural Alabama in 1926. She was a childhood tomboy and lover of books. Lee wrote for her college newspaper but never completed a degree. She moved to New York in 1949, working as an airline reservation clerk by day and a fledgling novelist by night. During this time, she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, a gutsy tale of social and racial injustice that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961.

A film adaption starring Gregory Peck as lawyer Atticus Finch followed within a year. Since then, the novel has sold nearly 40 million copies in 40 languages. Though she began other novels, Lee left them all unpublished. She suffered a stroke in 2007 and by 2015 was deaf and almost blind, but her lawyer then announced the discovery of a lost manuscript. HarperCollins published Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, starring a grown-up version of the heroine of To Kill a Mockingbird, which Lee penned in the 1950s.

Lee never expected Mockingbird to get good reviews and found the attention distressing: “I hoped for a little … but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”