Harper Lee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To
Kill a Mockingbird, has died at age 89 yesterday.
Born on April 28, 1926, she grew up in Monroeville,
Alabama, where she was close friends with Truman Capote (whom she would later
help with his work on In Cold Blood). Her father was a lawyer, like
Atticus Finch, the hero of To Kill a Mockingbird.
She published it in 1960 and won the
Pulitzer Prize the following year. The 1962 film adaptation starring
Gregory Peck won three Academy Awards.
The book became a beloved classic and a mainstay on
assigned reading lists, but Harper Lee turned away from public life, and it seemed
unlikely she would publish again. In 2007, she suffered a stroke that led to
long-term health issues, which made it even more of a surprise in 2015 when her
publisher, HarperCollins, announced it would publish a manuscript found in a
safe deposit box that had served as an origin point for To Kill
a Mockingbird; that book, Go Set a Watchman, became an
instant bestseller last summer, despite controversy as to whether she had been
capable of consenting to its publication.
The new book catches up with the characters two decades later; Scout Finch
is a young woman living in New York City (as Harper Lee once did), home on a
visit to her family. Atticus, once a champion for civil rights in the
courtroom, now takes part in anti-integrationist meetings, to his daughter’s
horror and disappointment. Many readers were disappointed by a depiction of
Atticus as a racist, tainting the character’s image in the popular imagination
as a pioneer for equality.
Here you can read TIME's original review of
To
Kill a Mockingbird.
Here you can
read the novel and you can find an exhaustive analysis of the plot, characters
and themes here.
"Mockingbird still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive the years without preamble.”
Harper Lee, 1993
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