Posted on 02/19/2016 7:51:13 AM PST by Borges
Nelle Harper Lee, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 for her book, "To Kill a Mockingbird," has died at the age of 89, multiple sources in her hometown of Monroeville confirmed Friday morning.
Lee was born April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, the youngest of four children of lawyer Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee.
As a child, Lee attended elementary school and high school just a few blocks from her house on Alabama Avenue. In a March 1964 interview, she offered this capsule view of her childhood: "I was born in a little town called Monroeville, Alabama, on April 28, 1926. 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."
She moved to New York in 1949, where she worked as an airlines reservations clerk while pursuing a writing career. Eight years later, Lee submitted her manuscript for "To Kill a Mockingbird" to J.B. Lippincott & Co., which asked her to rewrite it.
On July 11, 1960, Lee's novel was published by Lippincott with critical and commercial success. The author won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year.
The film adaptation of the novel, with Mary Badham as Scout, opened on Christmas Day of 1962 and was an instant hit.
Harper Lee suffered a stroke in 2007, recovered and resumed her life in the hometown where she spent many of her 89 years. A guardedly private individual, Lee was respected and protected by residents of the town that displays Mockingbird-themed murals and each year stages theatrical productions of "To Kill a Mockingbird."
Lee returned to Monroeville for good once her sister Alice became ill and needed help. She'd eat breakfast each morning at the same fast-food place, and could later be seen picking up Alice from the law firm founded by their father.
Services for Lee have not been announced.
jk stands for ‘just kidding’
What does she have to do with the Obama/Scalia flap?
That story and the Starkweather murders still give me chills. I'm not sure why, except that they were both so senseless and took place in such innocuous settings. Holcomb, Kansas? Middle Nebraska? If those places aren't safe, where is?
Flannery O’Conner, who also was a female writer from the South, spoke of how modern authors seemed to be steeped in “nihilism.” O’Conner was a strong Catholic and she felt “modern” writers had abandoned any objective, final truth, such as Christianity, and thus had no moral base on which to judge anything.
Everything therefore is “relative.” Ethics and actions are only true if they are accepted by the shifting views of the day. Political correctness, for example, is pure moral relativism.
Flannery was an near exact contemporary of Harper Lee. Just over a year older.
Run and play Scout. Climb a tree, swing on a rope, play hide and seek till dark, roll a old car tire down the street, visit Boo, sip lemonade on a hot afternoon and once again read to your Father once more and return to those days when a skinned knee was the worse you had to worry about.
And we will remember you and Jem, Dill, Atticus,Miss Maudie and all the wonderful characters you introduced us to and hopefully remember the lesson you taught that in the end we are all only human.
I have an Aunt that knew her well and until recent years had been in touch with her on a regular basis. She knew her from New York and she always told me that she helped Truman Capote a great deal and pretty much did all the research and helped write “In Cold Blood”. Sometimes an author has only one great book in them and for Nell it was TKAM, doesn’t mean she was wasn’t a good writer.
“Franny and Zooey” is generally considered a “book,” even though it isn’t strictly a full-length novel. Kind of like Steinbeck’s “Red Pony” or Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea.”
The most damning of “moral relativism” in her original submission which became “To Kill a Mockingbird” (the original Go Set a Watchman)— was that the attorney who was asked to defend the character Tom (who was innocent of the charges)was a Klan supporter. It certainly didn’t fit the liberal meme that a pro-klan white attorney (which in the 20’s was as commonplace as dirt in the South, and many other places (Ohio, Indiana,Kentucky, Illinois) when the second gestation of the klan was at it’s peak of membership (such that FDR’s first nominee for the SCOTUS, was a klan member- and approved by the Senate— one Justice Hugo Black).
Just to keep the record straight— the liberal publisher would have nothing to do with an accurate portrayal of a common honorable figure in the character of Atticus Finch, in business to survive in the Depression.
And Flannery was referring to Faulkner, as nihilist as a commode hugging drunk from anywhere, but especially the South— could be.
Other way around, she helped him write “In Cold Blood”.
Go Set a Watchman.
It wasn’t very good writing, but the story was interesting.
The characters are complex (not one dimensional ... not angels or devils but a mixture ... like real people).
They were childhood friends. Capote is the character “Dill” who comes to visit the summer of the events and trial.
That sounds morally convoluted to me. One might oppose civil rights for blacks, but recoil at the prospect of an actual individual black man being railroaded for a crime he did not commit. How can that be?
I slightly knew one of the girls that found the Clutter family bodies when I was in school at KU. She was the upperclass-woman Sorority adviser to my girl friend.
You could not grow up in Kansas in the 50s and 60s and not know that story. In fact, I think I have a first edition of In Cold Blood.
My impression was that Capote’s account was somewhat less than accurate because he became too close to one of the killers and that and commercialism made him fudge the account.
About ‘In Cold Blood’, Tom Wolfe wrote in his essay “Pornoviolence”: “The book is neither a who-done-it nor a will-they-be-caught, since the answers to both questions are known from the outset... Instead, the book’s suspense is based largely on a totally new idea in detective stories: the promise of gory details, and the withholding of them until the end.
Have always thought the term “moral relativism” was incorrect. Better would be “moral equationalism” since in every “relative” comparison, the social norms and civility were forced on society and individuals to be equal to spiritually and religiously (and psychiatrically) depraved immorality.
IOW the equating of clearly unequal behaviours somehow made them “relative” to each other, when, in fact they were (and are) polar opposites.
Yes, I am aware of that as well. In fact, she appears as the inspiration for a character in one of his stories.
He seemed to me to be one of the first talk show maintained celebrities. His later years yielded very little but that last decade was full of TV show appearances and gossip column bits — gay culture at work.
Interesting. I don't know much about Faulkner. Did she write anything about him?
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