WASHINGTON — She gave us legendary characters like Atticus Finch, Tom Robinson and Boo Radley in her groundbreaking novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Now, author Harper Lee has died. She was 89.
Her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel helped change race relations in America, especially after the 1962 film of the same name starring Gregory Peck, who won the Oscar for Best Actor.
Lee was born April 28, 1926, the youngest of four children in Monroeville, Alabama, where her childhood inspired the fictional small town of Maycomb that provides the setting for “Mockingbird.”
She was longtime friends with author Truman Capote, a friendship that fueled wide speculation that she not only based the “Mockingbird” character Dill on Capote, but that she helped him behind the scenes on the novel “In Cold Blood,” a working relationship explored in the movie “Capote” (2005).
“Mockingbird” remained the only published novel of her career until the 2015 “Mockingbird” sequel “Go Set a Watchman,” which was actually written before “Mockingbird” as a writer’s draft. The publication sparked controversy over whether Lee was of sound mind to approve the book’s release, as well as debate over the book’s re-imagining of Atticus as a racist during the segregationist 1950s.
Nonetheless, “Watchman” flew off the shelves off the strength and reputation of the beloved “Mockingbird,” which turned Atticus Finch into a patron-saint of the Civil Rights Movement.
Lee was 89.
