Posted on 02/19/2016 7:51:13 AM PST by Borges
Nelle Harper Lee, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 for her book, "To Kill a Mockingbird," has died at the age of 89, multiple sources in her hometown of Monroeville confirmed Friday morning.
Lee was born April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, the youngest of four children of lawyer Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee.
As a child, Lee attended elementary school and high school just a few blocks from her house on Alabama Avenue. In a March 1964 interview, she offered this capsule view of her childhood: "I was born in a little town called Monroeville, Alabama, on April 28, 1926. I went to school in the local grammar school, went to high school there, and then went to the University of Alabama. That's about it, as far as education goes."
She moved to New York in 1949, where she worked as an airlines reservations clerk while pursuing a writing career. Eight years later, Lee submitted her manuscript for "To Kill a Mockingbird" to J.B. Lippincott & Co., which asked her to rewrite it.
On July 11, 1960, Lee's novel was published by Lippincott with critical and commercial success. The author won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year.
The film adaptation of the novel, with Mary Badham as Scout, opened on Christmas Day of 1962 and was an instant hit.
Harper Lee suffered a stroke in 2007, recovered and resumed her life in the hometown where she spent many of her 89 years. A guardedly private individual, Lee was respected and protected by residents of the town that displays Mockingbird-themed murals and each year stages theatrical productions of "To Kill a Mockingbird."
Lee returned to Monroeville for good once her sister Alice became ill and needed help. She'd eat breakfast each morning at the same fast-food place, and could later be seen picking up Alice from the law firm founded by their father.
Services for Lee have not been announced.
Yes, some may think so, but consider: We were all a bunch of hormones with legs in HS and we were supposed to read a book about a guy trying to get his hormones satiated! I was like, "Man, I know all about this crap! I don't need Holden Caulfield's pitiful existence to mirror my own!"......................
Like winning the Lottery the first time you play!........................
Please don’t mock my favorite..........................velvet paintings!.......................
I was too bust trying to get laid to empathize with Holden’s situation!..................
Truman Capote wrote all the good parts.
I found TKAM to be trite. Atticus Finch is a cardboard character, and the trial was pure bed wetter fantasy. However, the subplot of Scout and Boo Radkey was beautifully done—and sounds like Truman Capote.
TKAM is now under fire from feminists for ‘victim shaming’ and putting forward the ‘myth of the false rape accusation’.
When Atticus kills the rabid dog.
Which have been disproven over and over again.
Everyone knows it was really Sir Francis Bacon...
While some of To Kill a Mockingbird is very well-written, other parts seem like cheap melodrama or outright propaganda.
The whole inverted myth about blacks generally being the noble victims of crime rather than its perpetrators is fed to us non-stop by the media today. It's a false meme that we can thank TKAM for.
On the other hand, I've always loved the story of Boo Radley. I wish the novel had focused more on the Radleys and less on Atticus and his Noble Black Victim client, but then we'd have a Faulkner novel rather than a Harper Lee novel.
The only thing I liked about that book was when they found the tree with the hole in it and finding the stuff hidden in it.
Read Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” and some of TKAM that has to do with the town, the kids, the ordinary people. Not the phoney crusading lawyer stuff...I am convinced that what is good about TKAM us Capote. Plus, isn’t it odd that she could only write one book?
RIP.
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