Harper Lee, who wrote America’s most enduring literary classics, To Kill a Mockingbird, passed away on Friday at the age of 89.
Mary Jakson, the city clerk in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, said by phone that Lee had died. A woman who answered the phone at the office of Harper Lee’s attorney, Tonja Carter, read a statement on behalf of the family that said Lee “passed away early this morning in her sleep. Her passing was unexpected.”
“Mockingbird,” was published in 1960, was inspired from elements of Lee’s childhood in Alabama. In the novel she describes how an impulsive girl, Scout Finch, her older brother Jem, their friend Dill get caught up in the case of Tom Robinson, a black man who’s been accused of rape in Maycomb, Alabama.
“When Harper Lee sat down to write To Kill a Mockingbird, she wasn’t seeking awards or fame. She was a country girl who just wanted to tell an honest story about life as she saw it,” the Obama family said in a statement.
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.
