Harper Lee, Author of the Novel We Have All Read, To Kill a Mockingbird, Dies at 89
Photo via Forbes.com
Harper Lee, the acclaimed author of To Kill a Mockingbird, died on Feb. 19, 2016 at 89 years old in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. By the time they graduate, there is almost no U.S. university student who has not read Ms. Lee’s famous novel. Mockingbird was published in 1960, and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year. This instant success turned Ms. Lee into a literary celebrity, a role she did not take to, causing her to withdraw from public life soon after. Then, just last summer, Ms. Lee reemerged with the July 2015 publication of Go Set a Watchman, a novel she wrote prior to Mockingbird, but was set in fictional time after the events in Mockingbird.
In 1962, a film version of Mockingbird was released star-ing Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, the father of the protagonist Jean Louise (‘Scout’) and her brother, Jeremy (‘Jem’). The novel and movie focus on racial injustice in a small Alabama town quickly became a beloved work and one of the most taught novels ever writ-ten, according to The New York Times. The novel focuses on Atticus Finch, a Southern lawyer, defending a black man on trial who was falsely accused of raping a white woman.
Almost every reader can identify with Scout in Mockingbird. She is a tomboy, who spends her summers chasing after her brother Jem and a neighborhood friend, Dill. The New York Times remarks how Ms. Lee was able to write about “simple pleasures of an ordinary small town in Alabama” as well as act as a “sobering tale of race relations in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era.” The depiction of Atticus standing against racism struck a cord with many Americans, many of who were becoming aware of the civil rights movement for the first time.
Mockingbird sold 10 million copies by 1970, was be-ing taught in 74% of secondary schools by 1988, and was named a best novel of the 20th Century in 1999, according to The New York Times. The story is deeply personal to Ms. Lee, and in fact can be seen to tell a sort of story about her childhood. Ms. Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, a small town in Southern Alabama. Her father, A.C. Lee was a prominent lawyer, and definitely served as the model for Atticus. The character Dill is modeled after Truman Capote, who spent his summers living next door to Ms. Lee while staying with family. The two began a life-long friendship throughout these summers, and both began their literary careers together, making up their own stories on an old typewriter and dictating them to each other.
There is no doubt that Ms. Lee has left her mark on our world, for generations to come. Through countless documentaries, investigative novels, and spotty appearances, she has given a view to the South in a time period when many could not imagine what it was like to live there. In 1964 during one of her last major interviews, she said “I would like…to do one thing, and I’ve never spoken much about it because its such a personal thing. I would like to leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world.” It is evident that Ms. Lee loved her town, her family, which is why she chose to keep such a closed life for so many years. “There is something universal in this little world,” she said, “some-thing decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing.”
Well, Ms. Lee, there is no doubt that readers all over the world are lamenting in your passing. Your novel and the lessons it taught will live on for years, so Thank You, Harper Lee, for sharing your story.