Dead at 89, recluse who gave world To Kill A Mockingbird
HARPER Lee never expected to be famous, predicting that her first novel would receive a ‘quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers’.
She could then get back to living the quiet life in her beloved Monroeville, the small Alabama town that inspired To Kill A Mockingbird and where she died yesterday at the age of 89.
The author of one of the most popular novels ever written died in her sleep at a local retirement home after a remarkable life in which she completely retreated from the role of literary icon and a celebrity she detested.
Her publisher Michael Morrison described her as an ‘extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness’, as tributes poured in across the world – something that no doubt would have made Lee deeply uncomfortable.
No instant celebrity rejected fame quite so decisively as Lee, the daughter of a lawyer who inspired her most famous literary creation, Atticus Finch.
Her 1960 novel, based loosely on her observations of her family and neighbours, was a moving tale of small-town southern life and Finch’s courageous battle to defend an innocent black man against his racist neighbours.
It became an instant bestseller and a classic of modern literature. But the woman who wrote it remained an enigma, even when controversy finally caught up with her in her final years.
Lee never wrote another novel, although her publishers controversially decided to make one
‘Her pen froze’
out of the first draft of Mockingbird. Published last year, Go Set A Watchman, effectively a sequel, was not only poorly written but recast Finch as a racist who had flirted with the Ku Klux Klan.
As a young woman, Lee had studied to be a lawyer before deciding to pursue her dream of writing. She moved to New York and worked for the British airline BOAC, writing fiction in her spare time, before returning to Monroeville to help her older sister Alice care for their ailing father. When he died, Lee – who never married and was known locally by her real name of Nelle – stayed and lived with Alice.
After Mockingbird was published in 1960, she refused nearly all requests for interviews and appearances, relying on her beloved sister to represent her. But the enormous success of the 1962 film version of her book, starring Gregory Peck as Finch, only fuelled the interest.
Lee revealed virtually nothing if asked by strangers, saying she loved golf, admired her father and intended to publish her memoirs. Her neighbours, who helped protect her from the curious, insisted she was never quite the recluse that was made out and was friendly and chatty to those she knew.
In 2006, Lee wrote about her continuing dedication to books in a digital world full of ‘minds like empty rooms’. Yet aside from her great novel, she had only four articles published.
Asked why she never wrote another book, she explained that she had said everything she needed to say in To Kill A Mockingbird. Her cousin Richard Williams, who ran the local pharmacy, said he got a different answer: ‘She told me, “When you have a hit like that, you can’t go anywhere but down”.’
In fact, Lee did start on a second novel, entitled The Long Goodbye, but it was shelved. As her agent, JP Lippincott, put it: ‘Her pen froze.’
Mockingbird will naturally live on without its author: as well as the millions of copies sold every year, it has emerged that, in possibly her last artistic act, Lee had finally reconsidered her long reluctance to sell the stage rights.