Christy Bowe/ZUMA
Harper Lee, the iconic author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has died at the age of 89. Lee’s death was confirmed by a city clerk in Monroeville, Alabama, the New York Times reports. The mayor of Monroeville also confirmed the news.
To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961.
In 2015, more than five decades after To Kill a Mockingbird was published, her second novel, titled Go Set a Watchman, was released, after a 304-page manuscript following up on the classic was discovered.
“I was born in a little town called Monroeville, Alabama, on April 28, 1926,” she said in an interview in 1964. “I went to school in the local grammar school, went to high school there, and then went to the University of Alabama. That’s about it, as far as education goes.”
Reflecting on the overwhelming success of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee said in a 1964 radio interview that she never expected it and instead had hoped the book would be well received enough to inspire her to write more. “I got rather a whole lot [of encouragement], and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”
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