Harper Lee, the intensely private novelist whose 1960 masterpiece “To Kill a Mockingbird” brought her the Pulitzer Prize and a venerated place in American literature, has died, officials in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., said Friday. She was 89.
Lee’s novel about racism in a small Southern town was an instant bestseller, widely credited with drawing attention to the civil rights movement. It inspired an Oscar-winning movie of the same name that starred Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, the lawyer who shocks fellow whites in fictional Maycomb County, Ala., in the 1930s when he defends a black man against charges of raping a white woman. The novel was told through the eyes of his young daughter, Scout.
With more than 40 million copies sold, “Mockingbird” has never been out of print and ranks close behind the Bible in surveys of the most influential books.
Fifty-five years after “Mockingbird” made Lee a celebrity, she stunned the literary world by publishing a second novel: “Go Set a Watchman,” which she wrote before “Mockingbird.” It unfolds in the same small Alabama town but is told from the viewpoint of Scout as an adult. Most surprising to many Lee fans was its portrayal of Atticus as a racist.
The release of “Watchman” stirred enormous fanfare as well as questions about the circumstances of the manuscript’s surfacing after more than a half century under lock and key. Some of the questions centered on whether Lee, then 89, hard of hearing and partially blind, was able to fully consent to publishing the novel.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-harper-lee-dead-20160219-story.html
Lee’s novel about racism in a small Southern town was an instant bestseller, widely credited with drawing attention to the civil rights movement. It inspired an Oscar-winning movie of the same name that starred Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, the lawyer who shocks fellow whites in fictional Maycomb County, Ala., in the 1930s when he defends a black man against charges of raping a white woman. The novel was told through the eyes of his young daughter, Scout.
With more than 40 million copies sold, “Mockingbird” has never been out of print and ranks close behind the Bible in surveys of the most influential books.
Fifty-five years after “Mockingbird” made Lee a celebrity, she stunned the literary world by publishing a second novel: “Go Set a Watchman,” which she wrote before “Mockingbird.” It unfolds in the same small Alabama town but is told from the viewpoint of Scout as an adult. Most surprising to many Lee fans was its portrayal of Atticus as a racist.
The release of “Watchman” stirred enormous fanfare as well as questions about the circumstances of the manuscript’s surfacing after more than a half century under lock and key. Some of the questions centered on whether Lee, then 89, hard of hearing and partially blind, was able to fully consent to publishing the novel.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-harper-lee-dead-20160219-story.html
