Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, dies
by Bill Trott,
2016-02-19 18:07:53.0
HARPER Lee, who wrote one of America’s most enduring literary classics, To Kill a Mockingbird, about a child’s view of right and wrong and waited 55 years to publish a second book with the same characters from a very different point of view, has died at the age of 89.
Mary Jackson, the city clerk in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, confirmed to Reuters by phone that Lee had died.
For decades it was thought Lee would never follow up To Kill a Mockingbird and the July 2015 publication of Go Set a Watchman was a surprising literary event — as well as a shock for devotees of Mockingbird. In the first book, Atticus Finch was the adored father of the young narrator Scout and a lawyer who nobly but unsuccessfully defended a black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman. But in Watchman, an older Atticus had racial a views that left the grown-up Scout greatly disillusioned.
Lee reportedly had written Go Set a Watchman first but, at the suggestion of a wise editor, set it aside to tell a tale of race in the South from the child’s point of view in the 1930s.
Reuters
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee died on Friday. Picture: AFP
HARPER Lee, who wrote one of America’s most enduring literary classics, To Kill a Mockingbird, about a child’s view of right and wrong and waited 55 years to publish a second book with the same characters from a very different point of view, has died at the age of 89.
Mary Jackson, the city clerk in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, confirmed to Reuters by phone that Lee had died.
For decades it was thought Lee would never follow up To Kill a Mockingbird and the July 2015 publication of Go Set a Watchman was a surprising literary event — as well as a shock for devotees of Mockingbird. In the first book, Atticus Finch was the adored father of the young narrator Scout and a lawyer who nobly but unsuccessfully defended a black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman. But in Watchman, an older Atticus had racial a views that left the grown-up Scout greatly disillusioned.
Lee reportedly had written Go Set a Watchman first but, at the suggestion of a wise editor, set it aside to tell a tale of race in the South from the child’s point of view in the 1930s.
Reuters
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