The literary community says goodbye to one of its giants Harper Lee, the author whose one book about a young girl named Scout Finch became an instant American classic in 1960.

Nelle Harper Lee was born April 26, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, the town that inspired To Kill a Mockingbird. She was the baby of four siblings born to Frances (Finch) Cunningham, a homemaker, and Amasa Coleman Lee, a newspaper editor and lawyer. She studied law at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and wrote for the school’s newspaper but didn’t complete her degree and moved to New York City in 1949.

Lee, who was best friends with Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s), got a job working as an airline reservation agent and wrote short and long fiction in her spare time, eventually finding a literary agent in 1956. But it was in December of the same year that would change the course of her life and American history when her friends provided her Christmas gift: a year’s salary to take time off and write a book. That book turned out to be Go Set a Watchmen. After a couple years of rewriting and crafting something fit for publication, Lee ultimately turned in the manuscript for To Kill a Mockingbird.

55 years later, the author followed up Mockingbird, which is on every school’s required reading list, with a surprising release of the initial novel GSaW, and while it was not as well received, it did shake things up in the literary community and began a contemporary discussion on the significance and pitfalls of TKaM.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience. -Harper Lee

May she rest in peace.

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