Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Harper Lee Dies at 89

AOL.com reports that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee, best known for her iconic novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" has passed away at the age of 89. The author's Go Set a Watchman was just recently published.

Mockingbird, which received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961, was published July 11, 1960. There are currently over 30 million copies in print. The film adaptation of Mockingbird was released in 1962 and was also a critical and commercial success. The plot and characters are loosely based on her observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old. The novel deals with the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s, as seen through the eyes of two children. The novel was inspired by the racist attitudes she observed as a child in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Though Lee published only this single book for half a century, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to literature. Lee has received numeroushonorary degrees, and declined to speak on each occasion. Lee assisted close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966).

In February 2015, Lee's lawyer released a statement confirming the publication of a second novel, Go Set a Watchman. Written in the mid 1950s, the book was controversially published in July 2015 as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, though it has since been confirmed to be the first draft of the latter. [source]

Image courtesy of PBS Documentary (screenshot)

PBS recently aired a documentary on the famed author - watch the preview below:

To post a comment, you must register and login.