New York .- Harper Lee, the elusive novelist whose picture from a child’s perspective of racial injustice in a small town in the southern United States reflected in his novel “to Kill a Mockingbird” and that became required reading for millions of young and Oscar winning film, he has died. He was 89.
Lee died peacefully on Friday, publisher HarperCollins said in a statement. The publisher did not provide further details about the death. “The world knows that Harper Lee was a brilliant writer, but what many do not know is that it was an extraordinary woman of great joy, humility and kindness.
She lived life the way she wanted, in private surrounded by books and the people who loved her, “said Michael Morrison, director of HarperCollins US, the statement said.
most of his life Lee divided his time between New York, where he wrote his novel in the 1950s, and his native Monroeville, Alabama, which inspired the fictional Maycomb of his book. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” in its title, published in 1960, it is the story of a Scout nicknamed girl growing up in a southern town in the era of the Great Depression.
a black man is wrongly accused of raping a white woman and the father of Scout, the determined lawyer Atticus Finch, defends despite threats and contempt of many.
the book quickly became in a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film in a memorable 1962 film with Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus.
as the movement grew by civil rights in the United States, the novel inspired a whole new generation of lawyers, was assigned in high schools across the country and became a popular choice for readers of cities and even nationally.
2015 sales totaling more than 40 million copies worldwide, according to figures from HarperCollins, which makes it one of the most widely read American novels of the twentieth century. When the Library of Congress made a survey in 1991 on books that have changed the lives of people, “she Kill a Mockingbird” was second only to the Bible.
Lee became more mysterious as that his book became more famous. At first he promoted diligently. I used to talk to the press, wrote and gave speeches, including one went to a class of cadets at West Point.
But it began to decline interviews in the late 1960s, and until very late in life firmly avoided making any public comment on his novel or career. Out of some articles for Vogue and McCall’s in 1960 and the analysis to a history book Alabama nineteenth century in 1983, it did not publish any book until it surprised the world in 2015 when it allowed him to see the light “Go Set to Watchman “or” Go and put a guard “in Spanish. “Watchman” was written before “To Kill a Mockingbird” but developed 20 years later, in the same place and with many of the same characters.
Readers and critics were disappointed when they found a Atticus nothing that resembled the hero of the book published years earlier. The man who challenged the order of things in “Nightingale” was part of it in “Watchman”, which denounces a decision of the Supreme Court noted that segregation in schools is unconstitutional, noting that blacks can not have equality Total.
despite lukewarm reviews and questions about whether Lee was able to approve its publication, “Watchman” reached the top of the charts within a day of your ad and He remained so for months. Much of the history of Lee is the story of “Nightingale”, and responded to it.
There was a swaggering like Norman Mailer or a drinker as William Faulkner, not a recluse, not eccentric. According to his friends and people from Monroeville he was a warm, vibrant woman and knew he enjoyed life, playing golf, reading voraciously and attending plays and concerts. But just did not want to talk about it publicly.
Claudia Durst Johnson, author of a critical book on the novel by Lee, describes it as a person who protected his privacy “as other people of an older generation, which not come out and talked about them on Oprah or Letterman at the slightest provocation. “
according to Johnson, Lee also complained that the media invariably cited bad. Lee emerged more in recent years, although not always in the way we would have preferred.
He was involved in numerous legal battles over the rights of their books and denied that he had cooperated to the biography, “The Mockingbird Next Door. Life with Harper Lee “Marja Mills
But at other times he did it with more pleasure. He wrote a letter of thanks when the Chicago Public Library chose “Nightingale” for their first One Book, One Chicago program. In 2007 he agreed to attend a ceremony at the White House in which he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
At that time he also wrote a rare item for O, The Oprah Magazine, about how reading turned as a child in a village in Alabama at the time of the Great Depression, and how they remained the rest of his life. “Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, even slowly walked with books,” he wrote
2014 entered the digital era. And allowed his classic novel was published as an e-book, which he described as a ” ‘nightingale’ for a new generation.”
a new stage adaptation of “to Kill a Mockingbird” will come to Broadway in the 2017-18 season under the direction of Tony award winner Bartlett Sher, written by Oscar winner Aaron Sorkin. Nelle Harper Lee was known by family and friends as Nelle (pronounced Nell), the name of a relative named Ellen, spelled backwards.
As Atticus Finch, his father was a lawyer and a legislator state. One of his childhood friends was Truman Capote, who lived with relatives near Lee’s house for several years. Read a book on 2006 and two films about Capote revived attention to your friends, including his contributions to “In Cold Blood,” Capote’s classic novel “non-fiction” about the murder of a family on a farm in Kansas.
Capote creative model, naughty and lovable friend of Scout, Dill turned. In the novel Dill is described “as a Merlin Pocket, whose head was abuzz with eccentric plans, strange desires and rare whims”.
The friendship of Lee Capote became clear later when frequently traveled with him to Kansas , from 1959, to help you research for what would become another novel bestseller “in cold blood”.
He gave her the book and his old partner, Jack Dunphy, but never acknowledged the vital role played by Lee in its creation. Charles J. Shields, in the first biography of Lee, “Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee” showed how Capote Lee helped him to reach key figures in the investigation into the killing and gave astute observations and a lot of notes Capote wove in the book. Shields also rejected the rumor that Capote had written much of “Nightingale”.
For the film “Capote” 2005, Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Oscar for his portrayal of an author struggling with his inner demons while he is working on the book. Catherine Keener was nominated for an Oscar for her role as Lee.
The following year Sandra Bullock played Lee in “Infamous” with Toby Jones as Capote Lee said in the 1960s he was working on a second novel, but eventually forgot and never came to a publisher.
Lee investigated for another nonfiction book about a rare murder in a rural area of eastern Alabama, but abandoned the project in the early 1980.
the author studied at Huntingdon College in Montgomery in his first year as a college and moved the next year to the University of Alabama, where he wrote and editor turned the literary magazine of the institution .
After studying to be a lawyer like his father and older sister, Lee dropped out of college before graduation and moved to New York to become a writer, as he had Capote.
he worked as an employee of an airline reservations in the city in the early 1950s, while still writing. Finally Christmas with a loan from his friends, he resigned to write full time and the first draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird” came to his publisher, J.B. Lippincott, 1957.
The manuscript, according to the editorial, came under the heading of Atticus. He became “To Kill a Mockingbird” by an old saying that says it’s okay to kill a blue jay but a Mockingbird, because it gives the music to the world.
Lee worked with Tay Hohoff editor to give the book its final form, in a period of economic difficulty and trouble Lee rewrite. “Although Miss Lee had never published an essay or a story, this was clearly not the work of an amateur or novice,” wrote the editor in an account published by Lippincott in 1967. “… I knew the essential part of the trade, without any professional help, just to work and work tirelessly “.
in a letter to an aunt, Capote wrote in July 1959 than a year earlier Lee” showed me everything I wrote the book, and I really liked, he is very talented. ” Lee’s novel, but it is enormously popular, not considered by scholars in the same category as the work of other southern authors like Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor.
Decades after publication, shortly he has written about it in academic journals. Some have described the book as naive and sentimental, either dismiss the Ku Klux Klan as a minor problem in Maycomb or advocate for change through personal persuasion rather than collective action. The novel was also seen as patronizing to highlight the courage of a white man in the name of black
. O’Connor, in a letter dated October 1960 said: “I think so it is really a children’s book, I think that to be a children’s book works well”
We have created parallel. between Lee and Margaret Mitchell, another southern whose only novel “Gone with the wind” became a phenomenon and was turned into a film beloved by the public. But Mitchell’s book presented in a romantic light division between blacks and whites.
The book of Lee confronted her, but in a more gentle way than previous novels and later. Lee’s book presents the Scout memorabilia scattered about people, some eccentric recluse as Boo Radley in the rural county of Maycomb during the years in which his brother Jem reaches adolescence and she goes to school.
Some critics have pointed out that relies on stereotypes, such as the whites who make false accusations against a virtuous black. But the restless Scout, and the brave discreetly Atticus Finch have been praised as memorable and unique creations.
The tension of the book is built around the atmosphere of lynching in Maycomb while the black man is on trial, a stage reminiscent of the case of the violation for which he was charged a group of black teenagers known as the Scottsboro Boys in the same period.
“Yeah, obviously it does not take a genius to see that` Kill a Mockingbird ‘expressed in words of more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, “Lee wrote to a publisher in the 1960s.
” He has a Christian ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners “. — Weaver reported from Montgomery, Alabama. — This office has been corrected after the editorial pointed out that the author actually died on Friday.
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