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

Harper Lee in 2007, during a ceremony honoring the four new members of the Alabama Academy of Honor at the Capitol in Montgomery. (AP Photo/Rob Carr, File)

By Carmel Dagan, Variety

Harper Lee, author of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the greatest literary successes of the last century and the basis for a classic 1962 film of the same name, has died, the city clerk’s office in her hometown of Monroeville confirmed. She was 89.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the story of Atticus Finch, a lawyer in an Alabama town in the 1930s who defends a black man accused of killing a white man, and his daughter Scout Finch, won the Pulitzer Prize and has sold 30 million copies and been translated into 40 languages. It has never been out of print since its initial publication.

Claudia Durst Johnson’s critical study “To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries” quotes a study that found that To Kill a Mockingbird “has been consistently one of the ten most frequently required books in secondary schools since its publication in 1960” — this despite the numerous efforts, especially in the South, to have it banned. Johnson found a survey that ranked the book “second only to the Bible in being most often cited as making a difference in people’s lives.”

Gregory Peck starred as Atticus Finch in the 1962 film adaptation directed by Robert Mulligan.

Robert Duvall, in his bigscreen debut, played Boo Radley, and Brock Peters portrayed Tom Robinson, the black man unjustly accused but in the end still found guilty. The film was nominated for eight Oscars, winning for best actor (Peck), adapted screenplay (Horton Foote), and art direction. The film was also nominated for best picture; supporting actress for young Mary Badham, who played Scout; director; cinematography, black and white; and music score.

Lee was happy with Foote’s adaptation of her novel: “I think it is one of the best translations of a book to film ever made,” she declared. “In that film the man and the part met… I’ve had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I’ve always refused. That film was a work of art.”

The author became a friend of Gregory Peck’s, and was long close to the actor’s family; the actor’s grandson, Harper Peck Voll, is named after her.

In 1995 the film was voted into the National Film Registry by the National Film Preservation Board.

It was announced this month that Aaron Sorkin will write a new stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird for a Broadway run during the 2017-18 season.

During her period in New York, Lee initially worked as an airlines reservation clerk, before a monetary gift enabled her to get to work in earnest on To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1963 Lee appeared on The Merv Griffin Show, but she eventually returned to her home town of Monroeville, Alabama, for a long quiet life in which she did not give interviews.

Lee returned to the public eye in July 2015 with the publication of a second book, Go Set a Watchman, which had actually been written before To Kill a Mockingbird. Go Set a Watchman is the story of an adult Scout Finch, who lives in New York in the 1950s, like Lee, and goes South to visit her father, Atticus Finch, a lawyer who, as the civil rights movement is developing, has become a segregationist. Back in the ’50s, publishers were more interested in the flashbacks contained within Go Set a Watchman than in the novel itself, and those flashbacks formed the germ of To Kill a Mockingbird.

The publication of Go Set a Watchman (the title is an allusion to a Bible verse) caused a great deal of controversy in 2015; many critics and readers were dismayed to find that their beloved Atticus Finch, as much a symbol of the civil rights movement as many living, heroic figures of the period, had been transformed into a segregationist. But, of course, it only felt like a transformation — like a betrayal on the part of Lee — since this novel, a far less mature work than To Kill a Mockingbird, had been written first.

Despite the controversy, or perhaps because of it, Go Set a Watchman sold more than 1 million copies in its first week.

Lee was depicted in two recent high-profile films. She was friends from childhood with Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and, after writing To Kill a Mockingbird, she traveled to Kansas with him to assist him with the investigation that led to In Cold Blood — which in turn led to the movies Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006), both about how Capote came to write In Cold Blood. In the first, Capote was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Lee was portrayed by Catherine Keener; in the second, Toby Jones played Capote and Sandra Bullock played Lee. (Capote died in 1984.)
Source :AFP