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Harper Lee, elusive author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ is dead at 89

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,”

Atticus Finch tells his daughter, Scout, in one of the most memorable passages of the classic novel 
“To Kill a Mockingbird”

—

“until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Harper Lee, elusive author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ is dead at 89 : Few people in the world could claim to really understand Harper Lee, the novel’s elusive author, who died Feb. 19 at 89 in Monroeville, Ala.

"To Kill a Mockingbird," a coming-of-age story set in the Depression-era South where Ms. Lee grew up, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and sold more than 40 million copies, becoming one of the most cherished novels in modern American literature. One oft-cited survey asked respondents to name the book that most profoundly affected their lives. Ms. Lee’s novel ranked near the top, not far behind the Bible.

The novel arrived amid the growing movement for civil rights and drew much of its resonance from its hero, Atticus, a lawyer who nobly and futilely defends a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman in their segregated town. For many, Atticus was embodied by actor Gregory Peck, who received an Academy Award for his performance in the 1962 movie based on Ms. Lee’s book.

“What that one story did, more powerfully than one hundred speeches possibly could, was change the way we saw each other, and then the way we saw ourselves,”

President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama said in a joint statement.

“Through the uncorrupted eyes of a child, she showed us the beautiful complexity of our common humanity, and the importance of striving for justice in our own lives, our communities, and our country.  Ms. Lee changed America for the better.”

In the 55 years between the publication of “To Kill a Mockingbird” and the release in July 2015 of “Go Set a Watchman,” few Americans came of age without meeting Atticus; his doomed client, Tom Robinson; Scout and her brother, Jem; their peculiar friend, Dill; and Boo Radley — the mysterious neighborhood shut-in whom the children try to coax from the shadows.

Atticus, in particular, was beloved as the ideal father, even the ideal man in a society that was profoundly flawed, but, through wisdom such as his, perhaps redeemable.

The reverence surrounding Ms. Lee’s book compounded the shock, edging on disbelief, when readers learned the contents of “Go Set a Watchman,” a literary juggernaut pre-ordered online in numbers topped only by J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series.

Gradually, astonishment surrounding the book gave way to interpretations that perhaps generations of readers of “To Kill a Mockingbird” had asked too much of Atticus by expecting him, beyond the scope of that book, to be a saint. The man Ms. Lee presented in “Mockingbird” had represented an innocent defendant with conviction. But that Atticus knew only the American South of the 1930s and before, when neither society’s racist structure nor his moral rectitude had yet been challenged by the civil rights movement.

The older Atticus of “Watchman,” like many white Southerners of his era, appeared to be reeling in the changes brought about by integration. He had gravitated to an ideology made even more abhorrent for many modern readers when he, Atticus, of all men, espoused it.

Questions swirled about the book and its meaning — and about the competency of Ms. Lee, who by then was reported to be largely deaf and blind. How could the Atticus of “Mockingbird” be reconciled with the bigot of “Watchman,” or should any such reconciliation be attempted? Had Ms. Lee been manipulated into releasing an abandoned manuscript that might irrevocably alter her legacy — or, with questions of race still raw in American society, did she once again have some message to impart?

With her near-total retreat into private life in the mid-1960s, Ms. Lee had become, along with J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, one of the great literary enigmas of the 20th century. Often, she was called a recluse, a description that was intriguing but inaccurate. Ms. Lee — Nelle Harper or just Nelle to friends — simply rejected celebrity.

Curious onlookers were left with little more than conjecture about her life. Much meaning was found in her resemblance to Scout, their shared summertime diversions with a clever boy from out of town and their common adoration of their fathers. But once, Ms. Lee offered another clue.

“You know the character Boo Radley? Well, if you know Boo, then you understand why I wouldn’t be doing an interview because I am really Boo,”

Ms. Lee privately told Oprah Winfrey when Winfrey invited her to participate in a “Mockingbird” documentary, according to an account the talk-show host provided to the Los Angeles Times.

“I already said everything I needed to say. 

Already we have those buses coming down

to my house, and they pull up to the door still

 looking for Boo Radley, and I just don’t want

 that to happen any more than it already 

does.”

~(Harper Lee)~

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