Harper Lee, American author, Died at 89

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, and died on February 19, 2016.

She was an American novelist.

She was known for To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960.

Instantly successful, it won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modern American literature.

Even though Lee had only published this single book, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to literature, in 2007.

And then she received various honorary degrees, though she declined to speak on those occasions.

Lee also known for assisting her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966).

Truman Capote was the source for the character Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.

The structure and characters are loosely based on Lee’s observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that transpired near her hometown in 1936 when she was 10 years old.

The book deals with the unreasonableness of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s, as described through the eyes of two children.

The book was motivated by racist attitudes in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

During February 2015, her lawyer, Tonja Carter, released a statement authenticating the publication of a second novel, Go Set a Watchman.

Compose in the mid-1950s, the book was controversially published in July 2015 as a “sequel” of To Kill a Mockingbird, though it has since been authenticated to be Mockingbird’s first draft.

Harper Lee passed away at 89 yrs old.