Strange lady, but I loved To Kill A Mockingbird. Haven't read the other
book yet.
Sandy
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Sent: February-20-16 1:21 PM
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Subject: [ourplace] harper lee, 89, author of 'to kill a mockingbird'
Harper Lee, 89, author of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' . NEW YORK - 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. Hank
Conner, a nephew of Ms. Lee's, said she died in her sleep at the Meadows, an
assisted living facility. 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 s omeone would like it well enough to give me
encouragement. The enormous success 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. Statement from HarperCollins Lee elusive as 'Mockingbird' soared
In 'Watchman,' Finch is flawed But for more than half a century, a second
novel failed to turn up, and Ms. Lee gained a reputation as a literary
Garbo, a recluse whose public appearances to accept an award or an honorary
degree counted as important news simply because of their rarity. On such
occasions she did not speak, other than to say a brief thank you. Then, in
February 2015, long after the reading public had given up on seeing anything
more from Ms. Lee, her publisher, Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins,
dropped a bombshell. It announced plans to publish a manuscript - long
thought to be lost and now resurfacing in mysterious circumstances - that
Ms. Lee had submitted to her editors in 1957 under the title "Go Set a
Watchman. Ms. Lee's lawyer, Tonja B. Carter, had chanced upon it, attached
to an original typescript of "To Kill a Mockingbird," while looking through
Ms. Lee's papers, the publishers explained. It told the story of Atticus and
his daughter, Jean Louise Finch, known as Scout, 20 years later, when Scout
was a young woman living in New York. It included several scenes in which
Atticus expresses conservative views on race relations seemingly at odds
with his liberal stance in the earlier novel. The book was published in July
with an initial printing of 2 million and, with enormous advance sales,
immediately leapt to the top of the fiction bestseller lists, despite tepid
reviews. "To Kill a Mockingbird" was really two books in one: a sweet, often
humorous portrait of small-town life in the 1930s, and a sobering tale o f
race relations in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era. Looking back on
her childhood as a precocious tomboy, Scout, the narrator, evokes the sultry
summers and simple pleasures of an ordinary small town in Alabama. At a time
when Southern fiction inclined toward the Gothic, Ms. Lee, with a keen eye
and a sharp ear for dialogue, presented "the more smiling aspects" of
Southern life, to borrow a phrase from William Dean Howells. At the same
time, her stark morality tale of a righteous Southern lawyer who stands firm
against racism and mob rule struck a chord with Americans, many of them
becoming aware of the civil rights movement for the first time. The novel
had its critics. "It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it
don't know they're reading a child's book," Flannery O'Connor wrote in a
letter to a friend shortly after the novel's appearance. Some reviewers
complained that the perceptions attributed to Scout were far too complex for
a girl just starting gr ade school and dismissed Atticus as a kind of
Southern Judge Hardy, dispensing moral bromides. The book soared miles above
such criticisms. By the late 1970s "To Kill a Mockingbird" had sold nearly
10 million copies, and in 1988 the National Council of Teachers of English
reported that it was being taught in 74 percent of the nation's secondary
schools. 'I never expected any sort of success with "Mocking- bird." A
decade later, Library Journal declared it the best novel of the 20th
century. Nelle Harper Lee was born in the poky little town of Monroeville,
in southern Alabama, the youngest of four children. "Nelle" was a backward
spelling of her maternal grandmother's first name, and Ms. Lee dropped it
when "To Kill a Mockingbird" was published, out of fear that readers would
pronounce it Nellie, which she hated. Her father, Asa Coleman Lee, was a
prominent lawyer and the model for Atticus Finch, who shared his stilted
diction and lofty sense of civic duty. Her mother, France s Finch Lee, also
known as Miss Fanny, was overweight and emotionally fragile. Truman Capote,
a friend of Ms. Lee's from childhood, later said that Nelle's mother had
tried to drown her in the bathtub on two occasions, an assertion that Ms.
Lee indignantly denied. Ms. Lee was a tough little tomboy who enjoyed
beating up the local boys, climbing trees, and rolling in the dirt. "A dress
on the young Nelle would have been as out of place as a silk hat on a hog,"
recalled Marie Rudisill, Capote's aunt, in her book "Truman Capote: The
Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by an Aunt Who Helped Raise Him. One
boy on the receiving end of Nelle's thrashings was Truman Persons (later
Capote), who spent several summers next door to Nelle with relatives. The
two became fast friends, acting out adventures from "The Rover Boys" and,
after Nelle's father gave the two children an old Underwood typewriter,
making up their own stories to dictate to each other. Capote later wrote
Nelle into his first book, "Other Voices, Other Rooms," where she appears as
the tomboy Idabel Tompkins. She made a repeat appearance as Ann Finchburg,
nicknamed Jumbo, in his story "The Thanksgiving Visitor. Ms. Lee returned
the favor, casting Capote in the role of the little blond tale-spinner Dill
in "To Kill a Mockingbird. Ms. Lee attended Huntingdon College, a local
Methodist school for women, where she contributed occasional articles to the
campus newspaper and two fictional vignettes to the college's literary
magazine. After a year at Huntingdon, Ms. Lee transferred to the University
of Alabama to study law, primarily to please her father. Her own interests,
and perhaps her disposition, led her elsewhere. After her senior year, she
spent a summer at Oxford University as part of a student-exchange program.
On her return from England, she decided to go to New York and become a
writer. Ms. Lee arrived in Manhattan in 1949 and settled into a cold-water
apartment in the East 80s. Af ter working briefly at a bookstore, she found
work as a reservations agent, first for Eastern Airlines and later for BOAC.
At night she wrote on a desk made from a door. The local colony of displaced
Southerners regarded her askance. "We didn't think she was up to much,"
recalled Louise Sims, the wife of the saxophonist Zoot Sims. "She said she
was writing a book, and that was that. Editors at Lippincott told Ms. Lee
that her manuscript read like a string of anecdotes, not a novel, but
encouraged her to revise. Eventually they paid a small advance and assigned
her to work with Tay Hohoff, an experienced editor with whom she developed a
close working and personal relationship. Signs of its success were visible
almost immediately after it was published in July 1960. Both
Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild made the novel one of their
selections, and Reader's Digest selected it for publication in condensed
form. A week after its publication, it jumped to the top of th e bestseller
lists; it remained there for 88 weeks. News of the rediscovery of "Go Set a
Watchman" threw the literary world into turmoil. Many critics, as well as
friends of Ms. Lee, found the timing and the rediscovery story suspicious,
and openly questioned whether Ms. Lee, who was shielded from the press by
Carter, was mentally competent to approve its publication. It remained an
open question, for many critics, whether "Go Set a Watchman" was anything
more than the initial draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird. In a statement, Ms.
Lee, who said that she had assumed the manuscript was lost, wrote, "After
much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust
and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication.
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