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To Kill a Mockingbird To Kill a Mockingbird

Voted America's Best-Loved Novel in PBS's The Great American Read

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South--and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred

One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father--a crusading local lawyer--risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

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• New York, NY : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2015]

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National News | Harper Lee, author of classic novel ‘To Kill a…

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National News

National news | harper lee, author of classic novel ‘to kill a mockingbird,’ dies at 89.

Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune

Harper Lee at the Stage Coach Cafe in Stockton, Ala., in 2001

Rob Carr / AP 2007

Harper Lee, the elusive novelist whose child's-eye view of racial injustice in a small Southern town, "To Kill a Mockingbird," became standard reading for millions of young people and an Oscar-winning film, died Feb. 19, 2016. She was 89.  Read more .

Outside the old Blacksher house, a photo of the author Harper Lee, who wrote "To Kill a Mockingbird." The Blackshers are an old family in Uriah, Ala. The house was built in the first decade of the 20th century. Uriah is about 20 miles from Monroeville, Ala., where Lee was born and raised.

Mandel Ngan / AFP/Getty Images

This November 5, 2007 photo shows U.S. President George W. Bush presenting the 2007 Presidential Medal of Freedom to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC.

Harper Lee, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "To kill a Mockingbird," in 1963.

Penny Weaver, AP

This 2010 photo provided shows Harper Lee, author of "To Kill A Mockingbird," in her assisted living room in Montoeville, Ala. Amid concerns that Lee was not involved in the decision to publish a second novel, HarperCollins issued a statement in which she says she is "happy as hell" about the response to her upcoming book, "Go Set a Watchman."

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

"To Kill A Mockingbird" author Harper Lee, shown in November 2007 at a ceremony to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, has died, officials in her hometown said Feb. 19, 2016.

Author Harper Lee in 2001 outside the Blacksher home in Uriah, Ala. The house was built in the first decade of the 20th century. Uriah is about 20 miles from Monroeville, Ala., where Lee was born and raised.

Photo of the author Harper Lee, who wrote "To Kill a Mockingbird," laughing during dinner at Radley's Deli in Monroeville, Alabama.

Donald Uhrbrock / Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Harper Lee, author of "To Kill a Mockingbird," poses for a photo in the local coutrhouse of her hometown Monroeville, Ala., circa 1961.

Harper Lee in 2001 in Monroeville, Ala.

HarperCollins spokeswoman Tina Andreadis confirmed the author’s death to The Associated Press on Friday.

For most of her life, Lee divided her time between New York City, where she wrote the novel in the 1950s, and her hometown of Monroeville, which inspired the book’s fictional Maycomb.

“To Kill a Mockingbird,” published in 1960, is the story of a girl nicknamed Scout growing up in a Depression-era Southern town. A black man has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and Scout’s father, the resolute lawyer Atticus Finch, defends him despite threats and the scorn of many.

The book quickly became a best-seller, won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a memorable movie in 1962, with Gregory Peck winning an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus. As the civil rights movement grew, the novel inspired a generation of young lawyers, was assigned in high schools all over the country and was a popular choice for citywide, or nationwide, reading programs.

By 2015, its sales were reported by HarperCollins to be more than 40 million worldwide, making it one of the most widely read American novels of the 20th century. When the Library of Congress did a survey in 1991 on books that have affected people’s lives, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was second only to the Bible.

Lee herself became more mysterious as her book became more famous. At first, she dutifully promoted her work. She spoke frequently to the press, wrote about herself and gave speeches, once to a class of cadets at West Point.

But she began declining interviews in the late 1960s and, until late in her life, firmly avoided making any public comment at all about her novel or her career. Other than a few magazine pieces for Vogue and McCalls in the 1960s and a review of a 19th century Alabama history book in 1983, she published no other book until stunning the world in 2015 by permitting “Go Set a Watchman” to be released.

“Watchman” was written before “Mockingbird,” but was set 20 years later, using the same location and many of the same characters. Readers and reviewers were disheartened to find an Atticus who seemed nothing like the hero of the earlier book. The man who defied the status quo in “Mockingbird” was now part of the mob in “Watchman,” denouncing the Supreme Court’s ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional and denouncing blacks as unfit to enjoy full equality.

But despite unenthusiastic reviews and questions whether Lee was well enough to approve the publication, “Watchman” jumped to the top of best-seller lists within a day of its announcement and remained there for months.

Much of Lee’s story is the story of “Mockingbird,” and how she responded to it. She wasn’t a bragger, like Norman Mailer, or a drinker, like William Faulkner , or a recluse or eccentric. By the accounts of friends and Monroeville townsfolk, she was a warm, vibrant and witty woman who enjoyed life, played golf, read voraciously and got about to plays and concerts. She just didn’t want to talk about it before an audience.

Claudia Durst Johnson, author of a book-length critical analysis of Lee’s novel, described her as preferring to guard her privacy “like others in an older generation, who didn’t go out and talk about themselves on Oprah or the Letterman show at the drop of a hat.” According to Johnson, Lee also complained that the news media invariably misquoted her.

Lee emerged more often over the past few years, although not always in ways she preferred. She was involved in numerous legal disputes over the rights to her book and denied she had cooperated with the 2014 biography “The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee,” by Marja Mills.

After spending 18 months living as a neighbor to the Lee sisters, Mills said she would remember Harper Lee for her wit and her sense of fun.

During her days in Monroeville, Mills said she’d often answer the telephone and be greeted by Lee’s voice: “You pourin’?” Meaning coffee. Mills drank “dark oceans of coffee” with the sisters and tagged along on outings to local restaurants — David’s Catfish House was a favorite — and on country drives through the backroads of Alabam.

“She was quite gregarious in person. You could imagine what a storyteller she was. She’d start telling a story and she’d get tickled before she could get it out,” said Mills, a former Tribune reporter who originally visited Monroeville when “Mockingbird” was selected for Chicago’s “One Book, One Chicago” program. “She would just take her glasses off and tip her head back and just let loose with this infectious laugh.”

Lee wrote a letter of thanks in 2001 when the Chicago Public Library chose “Mockingbird” for its first One Book, One Chicago program. In 2007, she agreed to attend a White House ceremony at which she received a Presidential Medal of Honor. Around the same time, she wrote a rare published item — for O, The Oprah Magazine — about how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town, and remained one.

“Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books,” she wrote.

By 2014, she had given in to the digital age and allowed her novel to come out as an e-book, calling it “‘Mockingbird’ for a new generation.”

Born in Monroeville, Alabama, Nelle Harper Lee was known to family and friends as Nelle (pronounced Nell) — the name of a relative, Ellen, spelled backward. Like Atticus Finch, her father was a lawyer and state legislator. One of her childhood friends was Truman Capote, who lived with relatives next door to the Lees for several years. (A book about Lee in 2006 and two films about Capote brought fresh attention to their friendship, including her contributions to Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” the classic “nonfiction novel” about the murder of a Kansas farm family.

Capote became the model for Scout’s creative, impish and loving friend Dill. In the novel, Dill is described as “a pocket Merlin, whose head teamed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.”

Lee’s friendship with Capote was evident later when she traveled frequently with him to Kansas, beginning in 1959, to help him do research for what became his own best-seller, “In Cold Blood.” He dedicated the book to her and his longtime companion, Jack Dunphy, but never acknowledged how vital a role she played in its creation.

Charles J. Shields, in the first book-length attempt at a biography of Lee, “Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee,” showed how Lee helped Capote gain entrance to key figures in the murder investigation and provided keen observations and myriad notes that Capote wove into his book. (He also debunked a long-standing rumor that Capote had actually written much of “Mockingbird.”)

In the 2005 film “Capote,” Philip Seymour Hoffman won the best actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Capote struggling with his demons as he works on the book. Catherine Keener was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Lee. The next year, Sandra Bullock took the role of Lee in “Infamous,” with Toby Jones as Capote.

Lee said in the 1960s that she was working on a second novel, but over time it dropped from view and never reached a publisher.

Lee researched another book, a non-fiction account of a bizarre voodoo murder case in rural east Alabama, but abandoned the project in the 1980s.

Lee, who attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery as a freshman, transferred the next year to the University of Alabama, where she wrote and became editor of the campus literary magazine. After studying to be a lawyer like her father and older sister, Lee left the university before graduating, heading to New York to become a writer, as Capote already had done.

Lee worked as an airlines reservation clerk in New York City during the early 1950s, writing on the side. Finally, with a Christmas loan from friends, she quit to write full time, and the first draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird” reached its publisher, J.B. Lippincott, in 1957.

The manuscript, according to the publishing house, arrived under the title “Atticus.” The title later became “To Kill a Mockingbird,” referring to an old saying that it was all right to kill a blue jay but a sin to kill a mockingbird, which gives the world its music.

Lee worked with the editor Tay Hohoff in bringing the book to its final form, a period when Lee was scrimping financially and dealing with the difficulties of rewriting.

“Though Miss Lee then had never published even an essay or a short story, this was clearly not the work of an amateur or tyro,” the editor wrote in an account published by Lippincott in 1967. “… She had learned the essential part of her craft, with no so-called professional help, simply by working at it and working at it, endlessly.”

Capote, in a letter to an aunt in July 1959, said that a year earlier Lee “showed me as much of the book as she’d written, and I liked it very much. She has real talent.”

Her novel, while hugely popular, was not ranked many scholars in the same category as the work of other Southern authors such as Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor. Decades after its publication, little was written about it in scholarly journals. Some critics has called the book naive and sentimental, whether dismissing the Ku Klux Klan as a minor nuisance in Maycomb or advocating change through personal persuasion rather than collective action. The novel was also considered patronizing for highlighting the bravery of a white man on behalf of blacks.

O’Connor, in an October 1960 letter, said, “I think I see what it really is — a child’s book. … I think for a child’s book, it does all right.”

Parallels were drawn between Lee and Margaret Mitchell, another Southern woman whose only novel, “Gone With the Wind,” became a phenomenon and was made into a beloved movie. But Mitchell’s book romanticized the black-white divide; Lee’s work confronted it, although more gently than novels before and since.

Lee’s book features Scout’s often meandering recollection of the people — some eccentric, such as the reclusive Boo Radley — in rural Maycomb County, during the years when her brother Jem reaches adolescence and she enters school. Some critics said it relied at times on stereotypes, such as the mean, trashy whites making false charges against a virtuous black. But the tomboy Scout and the quietly courageous Atticus Finch drew praise as memorable, singular creations.

The book’s tension is built around the lynching atmosphere in Maycomb as the black man goes on trial, a scenario reminiscent of the Scottsboro Boys rape case of the same period. Scout, Dill and Jem, whose playful curiosity takes scary turns, witness the drama of an adult world with its own frightening lessons.

“Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct,” Lee wrote to an editor in the 1960s. “Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners.”

Associated Press

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Watch CBS News

Harper Lee, Author Of 'To Kill A Mockingbird,' Dies At 89

February 19, 2016 / 11:39 AM EST / CBS Pittsburgh

(AP) - Harper Lee was an ordinary woman as stunned as anybody by the extraordinary success of "To Kill a Mockingbird."

"It was like being hit over the head and knocked cold," Lee - who died at age 89, according to publisher HarperCollins - said during a 1964 interview, at a time when she still talked to the media.

"I didn't expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement."

"To Kill a Mockingbird" may not be the Great American Novel. But it's likely the most universally known work of fiction by an American author over the past 70 years, that rare volume to find a home both in classrooms and among voluntary readers, throughout the country and beyond.

Lee was cited for her subtle, graceful style and gift for explaining the world through a child's eye, but the secret to the novel's ongoing appeal was also in how many books this single book contained. "To Kill a Mockingbird" was a coming of age story; a courtroom thriller; a Southern novel; a period piece; a drama about class; and, of course, a drama of race.

"All I want to be is the Jane Austen of South Alabama," she once observed.

The story of Lee is essentially the story of her book, and how she responded to it. She wasn't a bragger, like Norman Mailer, or a misanthrope like J.D. Salinger or an eccentric or tormented genius. She was a celebrity who didn't live or behave like a celebrity. By the accounts of friends and Monroeville residents, she was a warm, vibrant and witty woman who played golf, fished, ate at McDonald's, fed ducks by tossing seed corn out of a Cool Whip tub, read voraciously and got about to plays and concerts. She just didn't want to talk about it before an audience.

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"To Kill a Mockingbird" was an instant and ongoing hit, published in 1960, as the civil rights movement was accelerating. It's the story of a girl nicknamed Scout growing up in a Depression-era Southern town. A black man has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and Scout's father, the resolute lawyer Atticus Finch, defends him despite threats and the scorn of many.

Praised by The New Yorker as "skilled, unpretentious, and totally ingenious," the book won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a memorable movie in 1962, with Gregory Peck winning an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus. "Mockingbird" inspired a generation of young lawyers and social workers, was assigned in high schools all over the country and was a popular choice for citywide, or nationwide, reading programs, although it was also occasionally removed from shelves for its racial content and references to rape.

By 2015, sales topped 40 million copies. When the Library of Congress did a survey in 1991 on books that have affected people's lives, "To Kill a Mockingbird" was second only to the Bible.

Lee herself became more elusive to the public as her book became more famous. At first, she dutifully promoted her work. She spoke frequently to the press, wrote about herself and gave speeches, once to a class of cadets at West Point.

But she began declining interviews in the mid-1960s and, until late in her life, firmly avoided making any public comment about her novel or her career. Claudia Durst Johnson, author of a book-length critical analysis of Lee's novel, described her as preferring to guard her privacy "like others in an older generation, who didn't go out and talk about themselves on Oprah or the Letterman show at the drop of a hat." According to Johnson, Lee also complained that the news media invariably misquoted her.

Other than a few magazine pieces for Vogue and McCalls in the 1960s and a review of a 19th century Alabama history book in 1983, she published no other work until stunning the world in 2015 by permitting the novel "Go Set a Watchman" to be released.

"Watchman" was written before "Mockingbird," but was set 20 years later, using the same location and many of the same characters. The tone was far more immediate and starker than for "Mockingbird" and readers and reviewers were disheartened to find an Atticus nothing like the hero of the earlier book. The man who defied the status quo in "Mockingbird" was now part of the mob in "Watchman," denouncing the Supreme Court's ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional and denouncing blacks as unfit to enjoy full equality.

But despite unenthusiastic reviews and questions whether Lee was well enough to approve the publication, "Watchman" jumped to the top of best-seller lists within a day of its announcement and remained there for months. Critics, meanwhile, debated whether "Watchman" would damage Lee's reputation, and the legacy of Atticus as an American saint.

Lee was in the news at other times, not always in ways she preferred. She was involved in numerous legal disputes over the rights to her book and denied she had cooperated with the biography "The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee," by Marja Mills.

Some occasions were happier. She wrote a letter of thanks in 2001 when the Chicago Public Library chose "Mockingbird" for its first One Book, One Chicago program. In 2007, she agreed to attend a White House ceremony at which she received a Presidential Medal of Honor. Around the same time, she wrote a rare published item - for O, The Oprah Magazine - about how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town, and remained one.

"Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books," she wrote.

By 2014, she had given in to the digital age and allowed her novel to come out as an e-book, calling it "'Mockingbird' for a new generation."

Born in Monroeville, Nelle Harper Lee was known to family and friends as Nelle (pronounced Nell) - the name of a relative, Ellen, spelled backward. Like Atticus Finch, her father was a lawyer and state legislator. One of her childhood friends was Truman Capote, who lived with relatives next door to the Lees for several years.

Capote became the model for Scout's creative, impish and loving friend Dill. In the novel, Dill is described as "a pocket Merlin, whose head teamed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies."

Lee's friendship with Capote was evident later when she traveled frequently with him to Kansas, beginning in 1959, to help him do research for what became his own best-seller, the "nonfiction" novel "In Cold Blood." He dedicated the book to her and his longtime companion, Jack Dunphy, but never acknowledged how vital a role she played in its creation.

Charles J. Shields, in the first book-length attempt at a biography of Lee, "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee," showed how Lee helped Capote gain entrance to key figures in the murder investigation and provided keen observations and myriad notes that Capote wove into his book. (He also debunked a long-standing rumor that Capote had actually written much of "Mockingbird.")

In the 2005 film "Capote," Philip Seymour Hoffman won the best actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Capote struggling with his demons as he works on the book. Catherine Keener was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Lee. The next year, Sandra Bullock took the role of Lee in "Infamous," with Toby Jones as Capote.

Lee said in the 1960s that she was working on a second novel, but over time it dropped from view and never reached a publisher.

Lee researched another book, a non-fiction account of a bizarre voodoo murder case in rural east Alabama, but abandoned the project in the 1980s.

Lee, who attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery as a freshman, transferred to the University of Alabama as a sophomore, where she wrote and became editor of the campus literary magazine. After studying to be a lawyer like her father and older sister, Lee left the university before graduating, heading to New York to become a writer, as Capote already had done.

Lee worked as an airlines reservation clerk in New York City during the early 1950s, writing on the side. Finally, with a Christmas loan from friends, she quit to write full time, and the first draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird" reached its publisher, J.B. Lippincott, in 1957.

The manuscript, according to the publishing house, arrived under the title "Atticus." The title later became "To Kill a Mockingbird," referring to an old saying that it was all right to kill a blue jay but a sin to kill a mockingbird, which gives the world its music.

Lee worked with the editor Tay Hohoff in bringing the book to its final form, a period when Lee was scrimping financially and dealing with the difficulties of rewriting.

"Though Miss Lee then had never published even an essay or a short story, this was clearly not the work of an amateur or tyro," the editor wrote in an account published by Lippincott in 1967. "... She had learned the essential part of her craft, with no so-called professional help, simply by working at it and working at it, endlessly."

Capote, in a letter to an aunt in July 1959, said that a year earlier Lee "showed me as much of the book as she'd written, and I liked it very much. She has real talent."

Her novel, while hugely popular, was not ranked many scholars in the same category as the work of other Southern authors such as Eudora Welty or Flannery O'Connor. Decades after its publication, little was written about it in scholarly journals. Some critics has called the book naive and sentimental, whether dismissing the Ku Klux Klan as a minor nuisance in Maycomb or advocating change through personal persuasion rather than collective action.

O'Connor, in an October 1960 letter, said, "I think I see what it really is - a child's book. ... I think for a child's book, it does all right." Decades later, Toni Morrison would call it a "white savior" narrative, "one of those," she told The Associated Press, expressing a common objection that so many books by white people reduced blacks to passive, secondary roles.

Parallels were drawn between Lee and Margaret Mitchell, another Southern woman whose only novel, "Gone With the Wind," became a phenomenon made into a beloved movie. But Mitchell's book romanticized the black-white divide; Lee's work confronted it, although more gently than novels before and since.

"Mockingbird" features Scout's often meandering recollection of the people - some eccentric, such as the reclusive Boo Radley - in rural Maycomb County, during the years when her brother Jem reaches adolescence and she enters school. Some critics said it relied at times on stereotypes, such as the mean, trashy whites making false charges against a virtuous black. But the tomboy Scout and the quietly courageous Atticus Finch drew praise as memorable, singular creations.

The book's tension is built around the lynching atmosphere in Maycomb as the black man goes on trial, a scenario reminiscent of the Scottsboro Boys rape case of the same period. Scout, Dill and Jem, whose playful curiosity takes scary turns, witness the drama of an adult world with its own frightening lessons.

"Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that 'To Kill a Mockingbird' spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct," Lee wrote to an editor in the 1960s. "Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners."

(Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

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I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee

by Charles J. Shields. Henry Holt, 2008; $18.95.

Curious about Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird? Finally her story is told; her childhood, success, seclusion and rejection of fame.

978-0-8050-8334-7

Harper Lee, author of 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' dies at 89

NEW YORK - Harper Lee, the elusive novelist whose child's-eye view of racial injustice in a small Southern town, "To Kill a Mockingbird," became standard reading for millions of young people and an Oscar-winning film, has died.

She was 89.

Lee died peacefully Thursday, publisher HarperCollins said in a statement. It did not give any other details about how she died.

In memoriam:  2016 celebrity deaths  

"The world knows Harper Lee was a brilliant writer but what many don't know is that she was an extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness. She lived her life the way she wanted to - in private - surrounded by books and the people who loved her," Michael Morrison, head of HarperCollins U.S. general books group said in the statement.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

For most of her life, Lee divided her time between New York City, where she wrote the novel in the 1950s, and her hometown of Monroeville, which inspired the book's fictional Maycomb.

"To Kill a Mockingbird," published in 1960, is the story of a girl nicknamed Scout growing up in a Depression-era Southern town. A black man has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and Scout's father, the resolute lawyer Atticus Finch, defends him despite threats and the scorn of many.

The book quickly became a best-seller, won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a memorable movie in 1962, with Gregory Peck winning an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus. As the civil rights movement grew, the novel inspired a generation of young lawyers, was assigned in high schools all over the country and was a popular choice for citywide, or nationwide, reading programs.

By 2015, its sales were reported by HarperCollins to be more than 40 million worldwide, making it one of the most widely read American novels of the 20th century. When the Library of Congress did a survey in 1991 on books that have affected people's lives, "To Kill a Mockingbird" was second only to the Bible.

Lee herself became more mysterious as her book became more famous. At first, she dutifully promoted her work. She spoke frequently to the press, wrote about herself and gave speeches, once to a class of cadets at West Point.

But she began declining interviews in the late 1960s and, until late in her life, firmly avoided making any public comment at all about her novel or her career. Other than a few magazine pieces for Vogue and McCall's in the 1960s and a review of a 19th-century Alabama history book in 1983, she published no other book until stunning the world in 2015 by permitting "Go Set a Watchman" to be released.

"Watchman" was written before "Mockingbird" but was set 20 years later, using the same location and many of the same characters. Readers and reviewers were disheartened to find an Atticus who seemed nothing like the hero of the earlier book. The man who defied the status quo in "Mockingbird" was now part of the mob in "Watchman," denouncing the Supreme Court's ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional and denouncing blacks as unfit to enjoy full equality.

But despite unenthusiastic reviews and questions whether Lee was well enough to approve the publication, "Watchman" jumped to the top of best-seller lists within a day of its announcement and remained there for months.

Much of Lee's story is the story of "Mockingbird," and how she responded to it. She wasn't a bragger, like Norman Mailer, or a drinker, like William Faulkner, or a recluse or eccentric. By the accounts of friends and Monroeville townsfolk, she was a warm, vibrant and witty woman who enjoyed life, played golf, read voraciously and got about to plays and concerts. She just didn't want to talk about it before an audience.

Claudia Durst Johnson, author of a book-length critical analysis of Lee's novel, described her as preferring to guard her privacy "like others in an older generation, who didn't go out and talk about themselves on Oprah or the Letterman show at the drop of a hat." According to Johnson, Lee also complained that the news media invariably misquoted her.

Lee emerged more often over the past few years, although not always in ways she preferred. She was involved in numerous legal disputes over the rights to her book and denied she had cooperated with the biography "The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee," by Marja Mills.

Other occasions were happier. She wrote a letter of thanks in 2001 when the Chicago Public Library chose "Mockingbird" for its first One Book, One Chicago program. In 2007, she agreed to attend a White House ceremony at which she received a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Around the same time, she wrote a rare published item - for O, The Oprah Magazine - about how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town, and remained one.

"Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books," she wrote.

By 2014, she had given in to the digital age and allowed her novel to come out as an e-book, calling it "'Mockingbird' for a new generation."

Born in Monroeville, Alabama, Nelle Harper Lee was known to family and friends as Nelle (pronounced Nell) - the name of a relative, Ellen, spelled backward. Like Atticus Finch, her father was a lawyer and state legislator. One of her childhood friends was Truman Capote, who lived with relatives next door to the Lees for several years. (A book about Lee in 2006 and two films about Capote brought fresh attention to their friendship, including her contributions to Capote's "In Cold Blood," the classic "nonfiction novel" about the murder of a Kansas farm family.

Capote became the model for Scout's creative, impish and loving friend Dill. In the novel, Dill is described as "a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies."

Lee's friendship with Capote was evident later when she traveled frequently with him to Kansas, beginning in 1959, to help him do research for what became his own best-seller, "In Cold Blood." He dedicated the book to her and his longtime companion, Jack Dunphy, but never acknowledged how vital a role she played in its creation.

Charles J. Shields, in the first book-length attempt at a biography of Lee, "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee," showed how Lee helped Capote gain entrance to key figures in the murder investigation and provided keen observations and myriad notes that Capote wove into his book. (He also debunked a long-standing rumor that Capote had actually written much of "Mockingbird.")

In the 2005 film "Capote," Philip Seymour Hoffman won the best actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Capote struggling with his demons as he works on the book. Catherine Keener was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Lee. The next year, Sandra Bullock took the role of Lee in "Infamous," with Toby Jones as Capote.

Lee said in the 1960s that she was working on a second novel, but over time it dropped from view and never reached a publisher.

Lee researched another book, a non-fiction account of a bizarre murder case in rural east Alabama, but abandoned the project in the 1980s.

Lee, who attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery as a freshman, transferred the next year to the University of Alabama, where she wrote and became editor of the campus literary magazine. After studying to be a lawyer like her father and older sister, Lee left the university before graduating, heading to New York to become a writer, as Capote already had done.

Lee worked as an airlines reservation clerk in New York City during the early 1950s, writing on the side. Finally, with a Christmas loan from friends, she quit to write full time, and the first draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird" reached its publisher, J.B. Lippincott, in 1957.

The manuscript, according to the publishing house, arrived under the title "Atticus." The title later became "To Kill a Mockingbird," referring to an old saying that it was all right to kill a blue jay but a sin to kill a mockingbird, which gives the world its music.

Lee worked with the editor Tay Hohoff in bringing the book to its final form, a period when Lee was scrimping financially and dealing with the difficulties of rewriting.

"Though Miss Lee then had never published even an essay or a short story, this was clearly not the work of an amateur or tyro," the editor wrote in an account published by Lippincott in 1967. "... She had learned the essential part of her craft, with no so-called professional help, simply by working at it and working at it, endlessly."

Capote, in a letter to an aunt in July 1959, said that a year earlier Lee "showed me as much of the book as she'd written, and I liked it very much. She has real talent."

Her novel, while hugely popular, was not ranked many scholars in the same category as the work of other Southern authors such as Eudora Welty or Flannery O'Connor. Decades after its publication, little was written about it in scholarly journals. Some critics has called the book naive and sentimental, whether dismissing the Ku Klux Klan as a minor nuisance in Maycomb or advocating change through personal persuasion rather than collective action. The novel was also considered patronizing for highlighting the bravery of a white man on behalf of blacks.

O'Connor, in an October 1960 letter, said, "I think I see what it really is - a child's book. ... I think for a child's book, it does all right."

Parallels were drawn between Lee and Margaret Mitchell, another Southern woman whose only novel, "Gone With the Wind," became a phenomenon and was made into a beloved movie. But Mitchell's book romanticized the black-white divide; Lee's work confronted it, although more gently than novels before and since.

Lee's book features Scout's often meandering recollection of the people - some eccentric, such as the reclusive Boo Radley - in rural Maycomb County, during the years when her brother Jem reaches adolescence and she enters school. Some critics said it relied at times on stereotypes, such as the mean, trashy whites making false charges against a virtuous black. But the tomboy Scout and the quietly courageous Atticus Finch drew praise as memorable, singular creations.

The book's tension is built around the lynching atmosphere in Maycomb as the black man goes on trial, a scenario reminiscent of the Scottsboro Boys rape case of the same period. Scout, Dill and Jem, whose playful curiosity takes scary turns, witness the drama of an adult world with its own frightening lessons.

"Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that 'To Kill a Mockingbird' spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct," Lee wrote to an editor in the 1960s. "Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners."

English 7 To Kill A Mockingbird/ History 7 Civil Rights: Harper Lee

• The Great Depression
• Art & Literature of Harlem Renaissance & the Great Depression
• Jim Crow and Brown v. Board
• The KKK and Intimidation in the South
• NAACP, The Anti-Lynching Campaign & The Scottsboro 9
• Art & Literature of the Civil Rights Movement

Learn about Harper Lee and the writing of To Kill a Mockingbird by exploring the databases, websites, and print materials below.

• Encyclopedia Britannica This link opens in a new window Primary Encyclopedia to locate thousands of articles, images, and more!
• Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) This link opens in a new window Standard, academic reference sources on a variety of topics.
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Database Passwords

• Database Passwords This Google Sheet has user names and passwords for all the databases that require them. It is accessible only to the Marlborough community via your Google Drive.

Internet Sources: Harper Lee

• Harper Lee's Novel Achievement, Smithsonian Magazine
• Harper Lee Biography, Biography.com
• Harper Lee Biography, Chicago Public Library
• Harper Lee, Author of 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' Dies at 89 from New York Times

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To Kill a Mockingbird: About Harper Lee

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‘The Mockingbird Next Door’ by Marja Mills

When she knocked at the modest home shared by Harper Lee and her older sister, Alice, Chicago Tribune reporter Marja Mills fully expected to be turned away.

In 2001, the Chicago Public Library was kicking off its “One Book, One Chicago” program with Lee’s 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and Mills had been dispatched to Monroeville, Ala., to profile its elusive author.

Lee’s semi-autobiographical tale of a courageous defense attorney, a black defendant, and childhood innocence lost in 1930s Alabama had sold millions of copies, and its movie adaptation, starring Gregory Peck, had won three Academy Awards. But Lee, who split her time between Monroeville and New York City, never published another book, shunned reporters and biographers, and encouraged her close associates not to talk to outsiders.

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Nevertheless, when Mills knocked and rang the doorbell, Alice Lee invited her inside. Still practicing law at 89 (and for a decade or so afterward), she was voluble and friendly. Later, she would encourage Nelle, as Harper Lee was known to intimates, to telephone Mills and drop by her hotel for an off-the-record chat.

After Mills’s story was published, an unlikely friendship developed. With the Lees’ enthusiastic support, the reporter rented a house next door in 2004 and, for about 18 months, shared their homely routines. The result, “The Mockingbird Next Door,” could be described as an authorized memoir — a rare, surprising, and respectful look at the Lees and their milieu.

Why did the Lees and their friends, who ranged from a retired hairdresser to a Methodist pastor and a onetime bank president, trust Mills? It’s clear that the reporter didn’t push too hard, that she knew how to blend in and when to beat a strategic retreat. Her own chronic lupus also made her sympathetic and vulnerable. “Beyond a shared passion for stories, for learning, it turned out that I had an awful lot in common with this gray-haired crew,” Mills explains. “Their joints hurt, too. They didn’t have the energy they once had either . . . These were my people.”

Mills accompanied the sisters as they drove rural roads, fed ducks, ate hearty Southern meals, watched college football, took exercise classes, sheltered from a hurricane, visited the laundromat. The book captures both the texture of Southern small-town life and the characters of the two Lees: Alice, orderly and precise, and Nelle, independent and feisty.

Alice regaled Mills with family history, while Nelle would telephone in the morning and say, “Hi, hon. You pourin’?” — the signal for Mills to put on a pot of coffee. “As disciplined as Alice was in her personal habits and routines,” Mills writes, “Nelle was a woman of appetites. It was part of what was appealing about her; her gusto for experiences and spirited debate and food.” Both sisters were bookish, hopeless at technology, and accustomed to living life on their own terms.

Mills was there, firing up the VCR, when two feature films about Truman Capote, Nelle’s childhood friend, were released. Nelle, who had helped Capote research his true-crime classic “In Cold Blood,” figured as a character in both. Their relationship had later soured. “Truman was a psychopath, honey,” Nelle tells Mills, in one of the memoir’s more startling moments.

Mills seems not to have pressed Nelle directly about why she didn’t publish a second book. Her sister Alice and her friend Tom Butts, the Methodist minister, suggested that the “the difficulty of living up to impossible expectations” created by her bestseller loomed large. Nelle had also talked of wanting to avoid “the pressure and publicity” and her sense that she had already said her piece.

“The Mockingbird Next Door” is an exceedingly polite book. It sheds no light, for instance, on the strange legal battle between Harper Lee (who had a stroke in February 2007 and is now 88) and a literary agent, Sam Pinkus, to whom she had, at one point, assigned her novel’s copyright (since returned to her). The suit, detailed in the August 2013 issue of Vanity Fair, was settled last year.

In 2011, The New York Times reported that Harper Lee was denying that she had cooperated with Mills’s book. Mills produced a statement by Alice Lee to the contrary, and “The Mockingbird Next Door” makes her case. Still, the renunciation seems a sad denouement to an otherwise charmed relationship.

Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review. E-mail her at [email protected] . Follow her on Twitter @JuliaMKlein .

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Scottsboro Trials

On March 25, 1931, a freight train was stopped in Paint Rock, a small town in Alabama. Nine young African American men who had been riding the rails from Tennessee to Alabama were arrested. Two white women, one underage, accused the men of raping them while on the train.

Within a month, one man was found guilty and sentenced to death. A series of sensational trials, known as the Scottsboro trials, followed based on the testimony of the older woman, a known prostitute. The prostitute was attempting to avoid prosecution under the Mann Act, which prohibited taking a minor across state lines for immoral purposes, like prostitution.

Although none of the men were executed, a number of them remained on death row for many years. The last defendant was released in 1950.

There are several striking parallels between Tom Robinson’s trial in To Kill a Mockingbird and the Scottsboro trials:

Time and Place

• The Scottsboro trials took place in 1930s northern Alabama.
• Robinson's trial took place in 1930s southern Alabama.

Accusers and Defendants

• The Scottsboro trials began with a charge of rape made by white women against African American men.
• Robinson's trial begins with a charge of rape made by a white woman against an African American man.
• Attitudes about Southern women and poor whites complicated both trials, making the accusers' statuses as poor white women a critical issue.
• The first juries in the Scottsboro trials failed to include any African Americans, a situation that caused the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the guilty verdict.
• The jury in Robinson's trial comprises poor white residents of Old Sarum.
• A jury in the Scottsboro trials ignored evidence; for example, that the women suffered no injuries.
• The jury in Robinson's trial ignores evidence; for example, that Tom has a useless left arm.

Central Figures

• Judge James E. Horton, a member of the Alabama Bar, overturned a guilty jury verdict in one of the Scottsboro trials, thus going against public sentiment in trying to protect the rights of the African American defendants.
• In To Kill a Mockingbird , Atticus Finch, lawyer, legislator and member of the Alabama Bar, defends Tom Robinson, an African American man. In doing so he arouses anger in the community.

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'To Kill a Mockingbird' author Harper Lee dies at 89

NEW YORK -- Harper Lee, the elusive novelist whose child's-eye view of racial injustice in a small Southern town, "To Kill a Mockingbird," became standard reading for millions of young people and an Oscar-winning film, has died. She was 89.

Lee died peacefully Friday, publisher HarperCollins said in a statement. It did not give any other details about how she died.

"The world knows Harper Lee was a brilliant writer but what many don't know is that she was an extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness. She lived her life the way she wanted to - in private - surrounded by books and the people who loved her," Michael Morrison, head of HarperCollins U.S. general books group, said in the statement.

For most of her life, Lee divided her time between New York City, where she wrote the novel in the 1950s, and her hometown of Monroeville, which inspired the book's fictional Maycomb.

"To Kill a Mockingbird," published in 1960, is the story of a girl nicknamed Scout growing up in a Depression-era Southern town. A black man has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and Scout's father, the resolute lawyer Atticus Finch, defends him despite threats and the scorn of many.

The book quickly became a best-seller, won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a memorable movie in 1962, with Gregory Peck winning an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus. As the civil rights movement grew, the novel inspired a generation of young lawyers, was assigned in high schools all over the country and was a popular choice for citywide, or nationwide, reading programs.

By 2015, its sales were reported by HarperCollins to be more than 40 million worldwide, making it one of the most widely read American novels of the 20th century. When the Library of Congress did a survey in 1991 on books that have affected people's lives, "To Kill a Mockingbird" was second only to the Bible.

Lee herself became more mysterious as her book became more famous. At first, she dutifully promoted her work. She spoke frequently to the press, wrote about herself and gave speeches, once to a class of cadets at West Point.

But she began declining interviews in the late 1960s and, until late in her life, firmly avoided making any public comment at all about her novel or her career. Other than a few magazine pieces for Vogue and McCall's in the 1960s and a review of a 19th-century Alabama history book in 1983, she published no other book until stunning the world in 2015 by permitting "Go Set a Watchman" to be released.

"Watchman" was written before "Mockingbird" but was set 20 years later, using the same location and many of the same characters. Readers and reviewers were disheartened to find an Atticus who seemed nothing like the hero of the earlier book. The man who defied the status quo in "Mockingbird" was now part of the mob in "Watchman," denouncing the Supreme Court's ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional and denouncing blacks as unfit to enjoy full equality.

But despite unenthusiastic reviews and questions about whether Lee was well enough to approve the publication, "Watchman" jumped to the top of best-seller lists within a day of its announcement and remained there for months.

Much of Lee's story is the story of "Mockingbird," and how she responded to it. She wasn't a bragger, like Norman Mailer, or a drinker, like William Faulkner, or a recluse or eccentric. By the accounts of friends and Monroeville townsfolk, she was a warm, vibrant and witty woman who enjoyed life, played golf, read voraciously and got about to plays and concerts. She just didn't want to talk about it before an audience.

Claudia Durst Johnson, author of a book-length critical analysis of Lee's novel, described her as preferring to guard her privacy "like others in an older generation, who didn't go out and talk about themselves on Oprah or the Letterman show at the drop of a hat." According to Johnson, Lee also complained that the news media invariably misquoted her.

Lee emerged more often over the past few years, although not always in ways she preferred. She was involved in numerous legal disputes over the rights to her book and denied she had cooperated with the biography "The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee," by Marja Mills.

Other occasions were happier. She wrote a letter of thanks in 2001 when the Chicago Public Library chose "Mockingbird" for its first One Book, One Chicago program. In 2007, she agreed to attend a White House ceremony at which she received a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Around the same time, she wrote a rare published item - for O, The Oprah Magazine - about how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town, and remained one.

"Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books," she wrote.

By 2014, she had given in to the digital age and allowed her novel to come out as an e-book, calling it "'Mockingbird' for a new generation."

A new play adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird" will land on Broadway during the 2017-18 season under the direction of Tony Award winner Bartlett Sher, written by Oscar-winner written by Aaron Sorkin.

Born in Monroeville, Alabama, Nelle Harper Lee was known to family and friends as Nelle (pronounced Nell) - the name of a relative, Ellen, spelled backward. Like Atticus Finch, her father was a lawyer and state legislator. One of her childhood friends was Truman Capote, who lived with relatives next door to the Lees for several years. (A book about Lee in 2006 and two films about Capote brought fresh attention to their friendship, including her contributions to Capote's "In Cold Blood," the classic "nonfiction novel" about the murder of a Kansas farm family.

Capote became the model for Scout's creative, impish and loving friend Dill. In the novel, Dill is described as "a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies."

Lee's friendship with Capote was evident later when she traveled frequently with him to Kansas, beginning in 1959, to help him do research for what became his own best-seller, "In Cold Blood." He dedicated the book to her and his longtime companion, Jack Dunphy, but never acknowledged how vital a role she played in its creation.

Charles J. Shields, in the first book-length attempt at a biography of Lee, "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee," showed how Lee helped Capote gain entrance to key figures in the murder investigation and provided keen observations and myriad notes that Capote wove into his book. (He also debunked a long-standing rumor that Capote had actually written much of "Mockingbird.")

In the 2005 film "Capote," Philip Seymour Hoffman won the best actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Capote struggling with his demons as he works on the book. Catherine Keener was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Lee. The next year, Sandra Bullock took the role of Lee in "Infamous," with Toby Jones as Capote.

Lee said in the 1960s that she was working on a second novel, but over time it dropped from view and never reached a publisher.

Lee researched another book, a non-fiction account of a bizarre murder case in rural east Alabama, but abandoned the project in the 1980s.

Lee, who attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery as a freshman, transferred the next year to the University of Alabama, where she wrote and became editor of the campus literary magazine. After studying to be a lawyer like her father and older sister, Lee left the university before graduating, heading to New York to become a writer, as Capote already had done.

Lee worked as an airlines reservation clerk in New York City during the early 1950s, writing on the side. Finally, with a Christmas loan from friends, she quit to write full time, and the first draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird" reached its publisher, J.B. Lippincott, in 1957.

The manuscript, according to the publishing house, arrived under the title "Atticus." The title later became "To Kill a Mockingbird," referring to an old saying that it was all right to kill a blue jay but a sin to kill a mockingbird, which gives the world its music.

Lee worked with the editor Tay Hohoff in bringing the book to its final form, a period when Lee was scrimping financially and dealing with the difficulties of rewriting.

"Though Miss Lee then had never published even an essay or a short story, this was clearly not the work of an amateur or tyro," the editor wrote in an account published by Lippincott in 1967. "... She had learned the essential part of her craft, with no so-called professional help, simply by working at it and working at it, endlessly."

Capote, in a letter to an aunt in July 1959, said that a year earlier Lee "showed me as much of the book as she'd written, and I liked it very much. She has real talent."

Her novel, while hugely popular, was not ranked by many scholars in the same category as the work of other Southern authors such as Eudora Welty or Flannery O'Connor. Decades after its publication, little was written about it in scholarly journals. Some critics have called the book naive and sentimental, whether dismissing the Ku Klux Klan as a minor nuisance in Maycomb or advocating change through personal persuasion rather than collective action. The novel was also considered patronizing for highlighting the bravery of a white man on behalf of blacks.

O'Connor, in an October 1960 letter, said, "I think I see what it really is - a child's book. ... I think for a child's book, it does all right."

Parallels were drawn between Lee and Margaret Mitchell, another Southern woman whose only novel, "Gone With the Wind," became a phenomenon and was made into a beloved movie. But Mitchell's book romanticized the black-white divide; Lee's work confronted it, although more gently than novels before and since.

Lee's book features Scout's often meandering recollection of the people - some eccentric, such as the reclusive Boo Radley - in rural Maycomb County, during the years when her brother Jem reaches adolescence and she enters school. Some critics said it relied at times on stereotypes, such as the mean, trashy whites making false charges against a virtuous black. But the tomboy Scout and the quietly courageous Atticus Finch drew praise as memorable, singular creations.

The book's tension is built around the lynching atmosphere in Maycomb as the black man goes on trial, a scenario reminiscent of the Scottsboro Boys rape case of the same period. Scout, Dill and Jem, whose playful curiosity takes scary turns, witness the drama of an adult world with its own frightening lessons.

"Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that 'To Kill a Mockingbird' spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct," Lee wrote to an editor in the 1960s. "Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners."

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As novel ‘Mockingbird’ soared, author Lee grew more elusive

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Harper Lee was an ordinary woman as stunned as anybody by the extraordinary success of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“It was like being hit over the head and knocked cold,” Lee — who died Friday at age 89, according to publisher HarperCollins — said during a 1964 interview, at a time when she still talked to the media.

“I didn’t expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.”

“To Kill a Mockingbird” may not be the Great American Novel. But it’s likely the most universally known work of fiction by an American author over the past 70 years, that rare volume to find a home both in classrooms and among voluntary readers, throughout the country and beyond.

Lee was cited for her subtle, graceful style and gift for explaining the world through a child’s eye, but the secret to the novel’s ongoing appeal was also in how many books this single book contained. “To Kill a Mockingbird” was a coming-of-age story, a courtroom thriller, a Southern novel, a period piece, a drama about class, and — of course — a drama of race.

“All I want to be is the Jane Austen of South Alabama,” she once observed.

The story of Lee is essentially the story of her book, and how she responded to it. She wasn’t a bragger, like Norman Mailer, or a misanthrope like J.D. Salinger or an eccentric or tormented genius. She was a celebrity who didn’t live or behave like a celebrity. By the accounts of friends and Monroeville residents, she was a warm, vibrant and witty woman who played golf, fished, ate at McDonald’s, fed ducks by tossing seed corn out of a Cool Whip tub, read voraciously, and got about to plays and concerts. She just didn’t want to talk about it before an audience.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” was an instant and ongoing hit, published in 1960, as the civil rights movement was accelerating. It’s the story of a girl nicknamed Scout growing up in a Depression-era Southern town. A black man has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and Scout’s father, the resolute lawyer Atticus Finch, defends him despite threats and the scorn of many.

Praised by The New Yorker as “skilled, unpretentious, and totally ingenious,” the book won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a memorable movie in 1962, with Gregory Peck winning an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus. “Mockingbird” inspired a generation of young lawyers and social workers, was assigned in high schools all over the country and was a popular choice for citywide, or nationwide, reading programs, although it was also occasionally removed from shelves for its racial content and references to rape.

By 2015, sales topped 40 million copies. When the Library of Congress did a survey in 1991 on books that have affected people’s lives, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was second only to the Bible.

Lee herself became more elusive to the public as her book became more famous. At first, she dutifully promoted her work. She spoke frequently to the press, wrote about herself and gave speeches, once to a class of cadets at West Point.

But she began declining interviews in the mid-1960s and, until late in her life, firmly avoided making any public comment about her novel or her career. Claudia Durst Johnson, author of a book-length critical analysis of Lee’s novel, described her as preferring to guard her privacy “like others in an older generation, who didn’t go out and talk about themselves on Oprah or the Letterman show at the drop of a hat.” According to Johnson, Lee also complained that the news media invariably misquoted her.

Other than a few magazine pieces for Vogue and McCall’s in the 1960s and a review of a 19th century Alabama history book in 1983, she published no other work until stunning the world in 2015 by permitting the novel “Go Set a Watchman” to be released.

“Watchman” was written before “Mockingbird” but was set 20 years later, using the same location and many of the same characters. The tone was far more immediate and starker than for “Mockingbird” and readers and reviewers were disheartened to find an Atticus nothing like the hero of the earlier book. The man who defied the status quo in “Mockingbird” was now part of the mob in “Watchman,” denouncing the Supreme Court’s ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional and denouncing blacks as unfit to enjoy full equality.

But despite unenthusiastic reviews and questions whether Lee was well enough to approve the publication, “Watchman” jumped to the top of best-seller lists within a day of its announcement and remained there for months. Critics, meanwhile, debated whether “Watchman” would damage Lee’s reputation, and the legacy of Atticus as an American saint.

Lee was in the news at other times, not always in ways she preferred. She was involved in numerous legal disputes over the rights to her book and denied she had cooperated with the biography “The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee,” by Marja Mills.

Some occasions were happier. She wrote a letter of thanks in 2001 when the Chicago Public Library chose “Mockingbird” for its first One Book, One Chicago program. In 2007, she agreed to attend a White House ceremony at which she received a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Around the same time, she wrote a rare published item — for O, The Oprah Magazine — about how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town, and remained one.

“Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books,” she wrote.

By 2014, she had given in to the digital age and allowed her novel to come out as an e-book, calling it “‘Mockingbird’ for a new generation.”

Born in Monroeville, Nelle Harper Lee was known to family and friends as Nelle (pronounced Nell) — the name of a relative, Ellen, spelled backward. Like Atticus Finch, her father was a lawyer and state legislator. One of her childhood friends was Truman Capote, who lived with relatives next door to the Lees for several years.

Capote became the model for Scout’s creative, impish and loving friend Dill. In the novel, Dill is described as “a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.”

Lee’s friendship with Capote was evident later when she traveled frequently with him to Kansas, beginning in 1959, to help him do research for what became his own best-seller, the “nonfiction” novel “In Cold Blood.” He dedicated the book to her and his longtime companion, Jack Dunphy, but never acknowledged how vital a role she played in its creation.

Charles J. Shields, in the first book-length attempt at a biography of Lee, “Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee,” showed how Lee helped Capote gain entrance to key figures in the murder investigation and provided keen observations and myriad notes that Capote wove into his book. (He also debunked a long-standing rumor that Capote had actually written much of “Mockingbird.”)

In the 2005 film “Capote,” Philip Seymour Hoffman won the best actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Capote struggling with his demons as he works on the book. Catherine Keener was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Lee. The next year, Sandra Bullock took the role of Lee in “Infamous,” with Toby Jones as Capote.

Lee said in the 1960s that she was working on a second novel, but over time it dropped from view and never reached a publisher.

Lee researched another book, a non-fiction account of a bizarre voodoo murder case in rural east Alabama, but abandoned the project in the 1980s.

Lee, who attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery as a freshman, transferred to the University of Alabama as a sophomore, where she wrote and became editor of the campus literary magazine. After studying to be a lawyer like her father and older sister, Lee left the university before graduating, heading to New York to become a writer, as Capote already had done.

Lee worked as an airlines reservation clerk in New York City during the early 1950s, writing on the side. Finally, with a Christmas loan from friends, she quit to write full time, and the first draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird” reached its publisher, J.B. Lippincott, in 1957.

The manuscript, according to the publishing house, arrived under the title “Atticus.” The title later became “To Kill a Mockingbird,” referring to an old saying that it was all right to kill a blue jay but a sin to kill a mockingbird, which gives the world its music.

Lee worked with the editor Tay Hohoff in bringing the book to its final form, a period when Lee was scrimping financially and dealing with the difficulties of rewriting.

“Though Miss Lee then had never published even an essay or a short story, this was clearly not the work of an amateur or tyro,” the editor wrote in an account published by Lippincott in 1967. "... She had learned the essential part of her craft, with no so-called professional help, simply by working at it and working at it, endlessly.”

Capote, in a letter to an aunt in July 1959, said that a year earlier Lee “showed me as much of the book as she’d written, and I liked it very much. She has real talent.”

Her novel, while hugely popular, was not ranked by many scholars in the same category as the work of other Southern authors such as Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor. Decades after its publication, little was written about it in scholarly journals. Some critics have called the book naive and sentimental, whether dismissing the Ku Klux Klan as a minor nuisance in Maycomb or advocating change through personal persuasion rather than collective action.

O’Connor, in an October 1960 letter, said, “I think I see what it really is — a child’s book. ... I think for a child’s book, it does all right.” Decades later, Toni Morrison would call it a “white savior” narrative, “one of those,” she told The Associated Press, expressing a common objection that so many books by white people reduced blacks to passive, secondary roles.

Parallels were drawn between Lee and Margaret Mitchell, another Southern woman whose only novel, “Gone With the Wind,” became a phenomenon made into a beloved movie. But Mitchell’s book romanticized the black-white divide; Lee’s work confronted it, although more gently than novels before and since.

“Mockingbird” features Scout’s often meandering recollection of the people — some eccentric, such as the reclusive Boo Radley — in rural Maycomb County, during the years when her brother Jem reaches adolescence and she enters school. Some critics said it relied at times on stereotypes, such as the mean, trashy whites making false charges against a virtuous black. But the tomboy Scout and the quietly courageous Atticus Finch drew praise as memorable, singular creations.

The book’s tension is built around the lynching atmosphere in Maycomb as the black man goes on trial, a scenario reminiscent of the Scottsboro Boys rape case of the same period. Scout, Dill and Jem, whose playful curiosity takes scary turns, witness the drama of an adult world with its own frightening lessons.

“Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct,” Lee wrote to an editor in the 1960s. “Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners.”

This story has been corrected to give the proper name of the Presidential Medal of Freedom; it is not the Presidential Medal of Honor. It also has been updated with publisher HarperCollins now saying Lee died Friday, not Thursday.