The American writer Harper Lee, author of the famous novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” ( “To Kill a Mockingbird”), died at 89 years old in the state of Alabama, confirmed today the publisher Harper Collins.
“We have lost a great writer, a great friend and a beacon of integrity,” he said his agent Andrew Nurnberg in a news publisher in which confirmed that Lee died in Thursday night in his hometown of Alabama.
The first reports of his death were published in a news portal Alabama and was corroborated later by various sources of the town of Monroeville, his birthplace and where he lived most part of his life.
The president of Harper Collins, Michael Morrison, said that the writer was a “brilliant” woman who gave off “cheerfulness, humility and kindness” and decided to live his life “as wanted privately, surrounded by books and the people who loved her. ”
“To Kill a Mockingbird” became almost from day one of the key pieces of literature in the southern United States, where Lee took up more than half a century ago issues that remain important today as racism, tolerance and justice.
From the innocent eyes of a child, the story is set in a southern Alabama town where hypocrisy of his sentence people to a black accused of raping a white teenager, despite all the evidence they said otherwise.
Since it was first published in 1960 by the publisher JBLippincott have sold more than forty million copies, is required reading in schools throughout the country and the author has a legion of followers in the United States and the world.
The novel, with which Lee won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, was adapted a year later to the cinema, in a film starring Gregory Peck and Mary Badham directed by Robert Mulligan, who ended up winning three Oscars in the edition of 1963.
“I never imagined that I would have any success with ‘to Kill a Mockingbird’” even admitted writer in 1964 in one of the few interviews he then gave to a local radio station, recalls today the New York Times.
Despite the enormous popularity that obtained after winning the Pulitzer and the success of the film in movie theaters, Lee decided to return to his people, to abandon literature and thereafter He rejected most of the interviews that they proposed to him.
Nearly fifty years of silence that were discontinued as a surprise at the beginning of 2015, when the publisher Harper Collins announced that it would publish a sequel to the famous novel, entitled “Go Set to Watchman “(” Go and put a sentinel “).
The release was surrounded by controversy because different media claimed that it was not a sequel but the original draft that Lee tried to publish in 1957 and ended up becoming “To Kill a Mockingbird” with his editor suggested corrections.
Both fans of the writer as literary critics then joined criticism of the publishing and even different media reported that the second book was discovered in 2011 and not in the fall of 2014, as he announced at the time Harper Collins.
Sin still had officially confirmed dead, many anonymous and prominent figures from the world of film readers, literature and the show turned to social media to lay off American writer .
From fellow profession as Erica Jong or popular television presenter Katie Couric, for whom Lee “was a gift to us all” to actress Debra Messing, who claimed that his famous book “changed the world”.
Perhaps who best summed up the mood of many was the activist Erin Brockovich, who did not hesitate to point out that “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a defense of what is right. “An idea that is not new but we need to remember from time to time. Rest in peace.”
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