‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ author Lee dies at 89

NEW YORK >> Harper Lee, the elusive novelist whose child’s-eye view of racial injustice in a small Southern town, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” became standard reading for millions of young people and an Oscarwinning film, has died. She was 89.

Lee died peacefully Friday, publisher HarperCollins said in a statement. It did not give any other details about how she died.

“Theworld knows Harper Lee was a brilliant writer but what many don’t know is that she was an extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness. She lived her life the way she wanted to — in private— surrounded by books and the people who loved her,” Michael Morrison, head of HarperCollins U.S. general books group, said in the statement.

For most of her life, Lee divided her time between New York City, where she wrote the novel in the 1950s, and her hometown of Monroeville, which inspired the book’s fictional Maycomb.

“To Kill a Mockingbird,” published in 1960, is the story of a girl nicknamed Scout growing up in a Depression-era Southern town. A black man has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and Scout’s father, the resolute lawyer Atticus Finch, defends him despite threats and the scorn of many.

The book quickly became a best-seller, won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into amemorable movie in 1962, with Gregory Peck winning an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus. As the civil rights movement grew, the novel inspired a generation of young lawyers, was assigned in high schools all over the country and was a popular choice for citywide, or nationwide, reading programs.

By 2015, its sales were reported by HarperCollins to be more than 40 million worldwide, making it one of the most widely read American novels of the 20th century. When the Library of Congress did a survey in 1991 on books that have affected people’s lives, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was second only to the Bible.

Lee herself became more mysterious as her book became more famous. At first, she dutifully promoted her work. She spoke frequently to the press, wrote about herself and gave speeches, once to a class of cadets at West Point.

But she began declining interviews in the late 1960s and, until late in her life, firmly avoided making any public comment at all about her novel or her career. Other than a few magazine pieces for Vogue and McCall’s in the 1960s and a review of a 19th-century Alabama history book in 1983, she published no other book until stunning the world in 2015 by permitting “Go Set a Watchman” tobe released.

“Watchman” was written before “Mockingbird” but was set 20 years later, using the same location and many of the same characters. Readers and reviewers were disheartened to find an Atticus who seemed nothing like the hero of the earlier book. The man who defied the status quo in “Mockingbird” was now part of the mob in “Watchman,” denouncing the Supreme Court’s ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional and denouncing blacks as unfit to enjoy full equality.

But despite unenthusiastic reviews and questions about whether Lee was well enough to approve the publication, “Watchman” jumped to the top of best-seller lists within a day of its announcement and remained there for months.

Much of Lee’s story is the story of “Mockingbird,” and how she responded to it. She wasn’t a bragger, like Norman Mailer, or a drinker, like William Faulkner, or a recluse or eccentric. By the accounts of friends and Monroeville townsfolk, she was a warm, vibrant and witty woman who enjoyed life, played golf, read voraciously and got about to plays and concerts. She just didn’t want to talk about it before an audience.

Claudia Durst Johnson, author of a book-length critical analysis of Lee’s novel, described her as preferring to guard her privacy “like others in an older generation, who didn’t go out and talk about themselves on Oprah or the Letterman show at the drop of a hat.” According to Johnson, Lee also complained that the news media invariably misquoted her.

Lee emerged more often over the past few years, although not always in ways she preferred. She was involved in numerous legal disputes over the rights to her book and denied she had cooperated with the biography “The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee,” by Marja Mills.

Other occasions were happier. She wrote a letter of thanks in 2001 when the Chicago Public Library chose “Mockingbird” for its first One Book, One Chicago program. In 2007, she agreed to attend a White House ceremony at which she received a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Around the same time, she wrote a rare published item — for O, The Oprah Magazine — about how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town, and remained one.

“Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod alongwith books,” she wrote.

By 2014, she had given in to the digital age and allowed her novel to come out as an e-book, calling it “‘Mockingbird’ for a new generation.”

Harper Lee