One of America's most distinguished authors passed away
in her sleep last eve in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where she had
lived most of her life. Harper Lee was 89
and had been in poor health after a stroke some years back. Her devoted older sister, Alice, passed away
last year at the age of 103.
Like Margaret Mitchell, who was equally famous, but who
died at a much younger age, Lee was known for only one novel: "To Kill a
Mockingbird." Unlike Mitchell, who
never wrote a sequel to her famous "Gone With the Wind," Lee did
produce what turned out to be a sequel to "Mockingbird," though it
was actually written first. "Go Set
A Watchman" was published only last year and set off something of a
controversy. Like it or not, the novel
was certainly no "Mockingbird," which won the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction in 1961.
Again like Mitchell, Lee was a unique Southern woman
writer, who spoke for her region and her state (Mitchell's was Georgia) and who
never allowed her personal lifestyle to be affected by fame or fortune. Neither woman anticipated that her respective
book would sell millions of copies and appeal to people all over the world, or
that the film versions of their books would become classic pieces of film
making. Yes, America has produced many other writers more critically praised
for their work, but none, with the possible exception of "Huck Finn",
that has touched such a deep chord in the American psyche.
For much of her life Lee was a close personal friend of
Truman Capote, an author whom the critics took more seriously, but who never
won a Pulitzer. Indeed, it has come to
light only in recent years how much Capote was indebted to Lee for the early
stages of development of his crime masterwork "In Cold Blood." Capote was an ungenerous, complicated person;
Lee was not. She spent most of her later
life in Monroeville with her sister, Alice, who never married either, doing the
kinds of things that most small town people do, except that she read more and
thought more. The South has produced a
host of fine women writers--Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne
Porter, Margaret Mitchell -- and Lee was one of them. It is to her everlasting credit that fame and
fortune did not change her and that she remained true to herself and her native
region to the very end.
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