Sad news out of Alabama this morning. Author Harper Lee has died:
Nelle Harper Lee, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 for her book, "To Kill a Mockingbird," has died at the age of 89, multiple sources in her hometown of Monroeville confirmed Friday morning.
Harper Lee had returned home in recent years:
Harper Lee suffered a stroke in 2007, recovered and resumed her life in the hometown where she spent many of her XXX years. A guardedly private individual, Lee was respected and protected by residents of the town that displays Mockingbird-themed murals and each year stages theatrical productions of "To Kill a Mockingbird."
Lee returned to Monroeville for good once her sister Alice became ill and needed help. She'd eat breakfast each morning at the same fast-food place, and could later be seen picking up Alice from the law firm founded by their father.
In 2015, her novel Go Set A Watchman was released and was widely viewed as a money grab by the publisher and those around her. From a New York Times opinion piece:
So perhaps it’s not too late after all to point out that the publication of “Go Set a Watchman” constitutes one of the epic money grabs in the modern history of American publishing.
The Ur-fact about Harper Lee is that after publishing her beloved novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” in 1960, she not only never published another book; for most of that time she insisted she never would. Until now, that is, when she’s 89, a frail, hearing- and sight-impaired stroke victim living in a nursing home. Perhaps just as important, her sister Alice, Lee’s longtime protector, passed away last November. Her new protector, Tonja Carter, who had worked in Alice Lee’s law office, is the one who brought the “new novel” to HarperCollins’s attention, claiming, conveniently, to have found it shortly before Alice died.
If you have been following The Times’s cleareyed coverage, you know that Carter participated in a meeting in 2011 with a Sotheby’s specialist and Lee’s former agent, in which they came across the manuscript that turned out to be “Go Set a Watchman.” In The Wall Street Journal — where else? — Carter put forth the preposterous claim that she walked out of that meeting early on and never returned, thus sticking with her story that she only discovered the manuscript in 2014.