Nonetheless, he had suffered bouts of debilitating fatigue following the loss of his wife and son. Lee died in Monroeville, Alabama on Palm Sunday, 1962. The following year Gregory Peck carried Lee's pocket watch as he accepted an Academy Award for portraying Atticus Finch in the movie version.
Atticus Finch, the lawyer character in the novel, is reputedly based, at least in part, on Amasa Coleman Lee.
Nonetheless, he had suffered bouts of debilitating fatigue following the loss of his wife and son. Lee died in Monroeville, Alabama on Palm Sunday, 1962. The following year Gregory Peck carried Lee's pocket watch as he accepted an Academy Award for portraying Atticus Finch in the movie version.
Harper Lee, beloved American novelist, has one of the strangest writing careers in American history. To Kill a Mockingbird, which is said to be one of the greatest American novels, is the only book Lee would ever have published.
"Harper Lee.biography." Bio.True Story. Biography.com, 1996-2012. Web. 26-28 Mar. 2012.#N#http://www.biography.com/people/harper-lee-9377021?.#N#"Harper Lee." NNDB. Soylent Communications, 2012. Web. 26-28 Mar. 2012.#N#http://www.nndb.com/people/572/000025497/.
Pulitzer prize winner who wrote one of the most widely loved American novels. Harper Lee on the porch of her family home, in Monroeville, Alabama, 1961, the year she won the Pulitzer prize. Photograph: Donald Uhrbrock/Time and Life Pictures/Getty Image.
Harper Lee, who has died aged 89, was the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Her story of race relations and legal injustice set in the American south in the 1930s, first published in 1960, won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1961, was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1962 and went on to sell more than 40m copies worldwide.
In 1955 Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery for refusing to sit at the back of a bus, and the ensuing bus boycott grabbed the attention of the world. A year later, the home of the Rev Martin Luther King Jr was bombed, and there was rioting in Tuscaloosa when a black woman tried to enrol at the University of Alabama.
He was memorably played by Gregory Peck in the film. The novel also required some rearrangement of Lee’s family life.
Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis. The publication in 2015 of Go Set a Watchman, marketed as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, made Lee briefly the most widely discussed writer in the English-speaking world.
The publication in 2015 of Go Set a Watchman, marketed as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, made Lee briefly the most widely discussed writer in the English-speaking world. Sales of more than 1.1m copies were reported in the US in the first week after publication, although reviews were decidedly mixed.
Dill was based on Lee’s childhood friend Truman Persons, who changed his name to Capote when his mother remarried, and Scout was Lee. The relationship between Dill and Scout is one of the most charming in American fiction.
Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, to Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Harper Lee grew up in the small southwestern Alabama town of Monroeville. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who also served on the state legislature (1926-38). As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and she enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote, who provided the basis of the character of Dill in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
After completing To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee accompanied Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to assist him in researching what they thought would be an article on a small town’s response to the murder of a farmer and his family. Capote expanded the material into his best-selling book, In Cold Blood (1966).
Harper Lee was portrayed by Catherine Keener in the film Capote (2005), by Sandra Bullock in the film Infamous (2006), and by Tracey Hoyt in the TV movie Scandalous Me: The Jacqueline Susann Story (1998). In the adaptation of Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1995), the character of Idabell Thompkins, who was inspired by Truman Capote ‘s memories of Harper Lee as a child, was played by Aubrey Dollar.