Harper Lee, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' author, has died at 89
NEW YORK (AP) — 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 Oscar-winning film, has died.
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.
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" to be released.
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.
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.
A new play adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird" will land on Broadway during the 2017-18 season under the direction of Tony Award winner Bartlett Sher, written by Oscar-winner written by Aaron Sorkin.
Charles J. Shields, in the first book-length attempt at a biography of Lee, "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee," showed how Lee helped Capote gain entrance to key figures in the murder investigation and provided keen observations and myriad notes that Capote wove into his book.
[...] with a Christmas loan from friends, she quit to write full time, and the first draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird" reached its publisher, J.B. Lippincott, in 1957.
Lee's book features Scout's often meandering recollection of the people — some eccentric, such as the reclusive Boo Radley — in rural Maycomb County, during the years when her brother Jem reaches adolescence and she enters school.
The book's tension is built around the lynching atmosphere in Maycomb as the black man goes on trial, a scenario reminiscent of the Scottsboro Boys rape case of the same period.
Scout, Dill and Jem, whose playful curiosity takes scary turns, witness the drama of an adult world with its own frightening lessons.
"Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that 'To Kill a Mockingbird' spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct," Lee wrote to an editor in the 1960s.