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.
How did her follow up book (which shockingly portrayed Atticus Finch as a KKK supporter ) do in the market?
RIP Harper Lee.
A legendary figure among writers.
Just saw a comment by a guy who said she helped destroy the world by moral relativism.
I don’t really understand what that means. Anybody?
So passes an observer of a different time. Thank you Ms Lee, I have enjoyed your book and the movie many many times.
Moral Relativism is a ‘catch all’ term people use about stuff they don’t understand or find ambiguous.
Her publisher gave her some solid advice, I doubt if she released the other novel first that she’d be remembered.
RIP to a “roll tide” alum.
There was another book that she wrote which came out last summer.
Whatever her faults, Harper Lee did not invent moral relativism.
I agree with Borges. Her characters were morally ambiguous, but that is just good character development.
I think it means her characters were not simple caricatures of good suffering coloreds and evil whites. They were real human beings living in complex social situations and reacting in flawed and imperfect ways, sometimes heroically, in some ways cowardly, with malice, with charity. The world she presents is chaotic, confusing, infuriating, and morally convoluted.
She was obviously a bad person to see the world this way.
A shame. I enjoyed both her books though the first one far more than the last.
It did OK in the market based on pre-release hype alone, though critics (and most others who read it) hated it. Not only because of the KKK stuff, but also because it just wasn't very good (at least as compared to the original).
It seems pretty clear that the book should never have been released (and that Lee was very likely manipulated into agreeing to release it)
I have no idea what that comment is supposed to mean with respect to Harper Lee.
With respect to the commentator himself, though, I think it means that some people have an overwhelming need to be contrarian and hate things that others love.
Prob the most realistic explanation. Yes, I can see that one.
It sold well over a million copies. Maybe over two million.
In any case, Lee, like JD Salinger and Margaret Mitchell, achieved almost all of her fame from a single work (although she and Salinger wrote more than one).
Well Mitchell died before she could write a follow up. Salinger published some really fine short fiction that many prefer to his one novel.
"Go Set a Watchman". Not as good as her first book was.
Pillow over the head?
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