To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee dies
ONE OF MOST TAUGHT WORKS OF FICTION
Harper Lee, whose first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, about racial injustice in a small Alabama town, sold more than 40 million copies and became one of the most beloved and most taught works of fiction ever written by an American, died on Friday in Monroeville, Ala.. She was 89.
Hank Conner, a nephew of Lee’s, said she died in her sleep at the Meadows, an assisted living facility.
The instant success of To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the next year, turned Lee into a literary celebrity, a role she found oppressive and never learned to accept.
“I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird,” Lee told a radio interviewer in 1964. “I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but, at the same time I sort of hoped someone would like it well enough to give me encouragement.”
The enormous success of the film version of the novel, released in 1962 with Gregory Peck in the starring role of Atticus Finch, a smalltown Southern lawyer who defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, only added to Lee’s fame and fanned expectations for her next novel.
But for more than half a century, a second novel failed to turn up, and Lee gained a reputation as a literary Greta Garbo, a recluse whose public appearances to accept an award or an honourary degree counted as important news simply because of their rarity. On such occasions she did not speak, other than to say a brief thank you.
Then, in February 2015, long after the reading public had given up on seeing anything more from Lee, her publisher, Harper, an imprint of Harper Collins, dropped a bombshell. It announced plans to publish a manuscript — long thought to be lost and now resurfacing in mysterious circumstances — that Lee had submitted to her editors in 1957 under the title Go Set a Watchman.
Lee’s lawyer, Tonja B. Carter, had chanced upon it, attached to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird, while looking through Lee’s papers, the publishers explained. It told the story of Atticus and his daughter, Jean Louise Finch, known as Scout, 20 years later, when Scout was a young woman living in New York. It included several scenes in which Atticus expresses conservative views on race relations seemingly at odds with his liberal stance in the earlier novel.
The book was published in July with an initial printing of two million and, with enormous advance sales, immediately leaped to the top of the fiction best- seller lists, despite tepid reviews.
To Kill a Mockingbird was really two books in one: a sweet, often humorous portrait of small- town life in the 1930s, and a sobering tale of race relations in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era. The novel had its critics. “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book,” Flannery O’Connor wrote in a letter to a friend shortly after the novel’s appearance. Some reviewers complained that the perceptions attributed to Scout were far too complex for a girl just starting grade school and dismissed Atticus as a kind of Southern Judge Hardy, dispensing moral bromides.
The book soared miles above such criticisms. By the late 1970s To Kill a Mockingbird had sold nearly 10 million copies, and in 1988 the National Council of Teachers of English reported that it was being taught in 74 per cent of the nation’s secondary schools. A decade later, Library Journal declared it the best novel of the 20th century.
Nelle Harper Lee was born in the poky little town of Monroeville, in southern Alabama, the youngest of four children. “Nelle” was a backward spelling of her maternal grandmother’s first name, and Lee dropped it when To Kill a Mockingbird was published, out of fear that readers would pronounce it Nellie, which she hated.
Her father, Asa Coleman Lee, was a prominent lawyer and the model for Atticus Finch, who shared his stilted diction and lofty sense of civic duty. Her mother, Frances Finch Lee, also known as Miss Fanny, was overweight and emotionally fragile. Truman Capote, a friend of Lee’s from childhood, later said that Nelle’s mother had tried to drown her in the bathtub on two occasions, an assertion that Lee denied.
Lee was a tough little tomboy who enjoyed beating up the local boys, climbing trees and rolling in the dirt. “A dress on the young Nelle would have been as out of place as a silk hat on a hog,” recalled Marie Rudisill, Capote’s aunt, in her book Truman Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by an Aunt Who Helped Raise Him.
One boy on the receiving end of Nelle’s thrashings was Truman Persons ( later Capote), who spent several summers next door to Nelle with relatives. The two became fast friends, acting out adventures from The Rover Boys and, after Nelle’s father gave the two children an old Underwood typewriter, making up their own stories to dictate to each other.
Capote later wrote Nelle into his first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms, where she appears as the tomboy Idabel Tompkins. She made a repeat appearance as Ann Finchburg, nicknamed Jumbo, in his story The Thanksgiving Visitor. Lee returned the favour, casting Capote in the role of the little blond tale- spinner Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Lee attended Huntingdon College, a local Methodist school for women, where she contributed occasional articles to the campus newspaper and two fictional vignettes to the college’s literary magazine. After a year at Huntingdon, Lee transferred to the University of Alabama to study law, primarily to please her father. Her own interests, and perhaps her disposition, led her elsewhere. After her senior year, she spent a summer at Oxford University as part of a student- exchange program. On her return from England, she decided to go to New York and become a writer.
News of the rediscovery of Go Set a Watchman threw the literary world into turmoil. Many critics, as well as friends of Lee, found the timing and the rediscovery story suspicious, and openly questioned whether Lee, who was shielded from the press by Carter, was mentally competent to approve i ts publication. It remained an open question, for many critics, whether Go Set a Watchman was anything more than the initial draft of To Kill a Mockingbird.
In a statement, Lee, who said that she had assumed the manuscript was lost, wrote, “After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication.”