Harper Lee, Author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Dies at 89 Friday February 19,2016

 

Harper Lee, whose first novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” about racial injustice in a small Alabama town, sold more than 40 million copies and became one of the most beloved and most taught works of fiction ever written by an American, died on Friday in Monroeville, Ala., where she lived. She was 89.

The instant success of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which was published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the next year, turned Ms. Lee into a literary celebrity, a role she found oppressive and never learned to accept.

“I never expected any sort of success with ‘Mockingbird,’ ” Ms. Lee told a radio interviewer in 1964. “I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but, at the same time I sort of hoped someone would like it well enough to give me encouragement.”

The enormous popularity of the film version of the novel, released in 1962 with Gregory Peck in the starring role of Atticus Finch, a small-town Southern lawyer who defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, only added to Ms. Lee’s fame and fanned expectations for her next novel.

 

The author of the America classic "To Kill a Mockingbird" was laid to rest on Saturday, in a private ceremony attended by only the closest of friends and family, a reflection of how she had lived.

A few dozen people who comprised Lee's intimate circle gathered at the First United Methodist Church to hear a eulogy on Saturday by her longtime friend and history professor, Wayne Flynt. Afterward, her casket was taken by silver hearse to an adjacent cemetery where her father, AC Lee and sister, Alice Lee, are buried.

Harper Lee, who died Friday  February 19,2016 at age 89, was eulogized at a church in the small Alabama town of Monroeville, which the author used as a model for the imaginary town of Maycomb, the setting of Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.