Author of “To Kill a Mockingbird” Harper Lee dead at 89

Harper Lee has died at the age of 89

MONROEVILLE- Harper Lee, the Alabama writer, famous for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,  “To Kill A Mockingbird,” has died at the age of 89.

Lee’s book, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” became an international bestseller and was adapted into a movie in 1962. Lee was 34 when the work was published.

A descendent of Robert E. Lee, the Southern Civil War general, Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama. Her father was a former newspaper editor and proprietor, who had served as a state senator and practiced as a lawyer in Monroeville. Lee studied law at the University of Alabama from 1945 to 1949, and spent a year as an exchange student in Oxford University,
Wellington Square. Six months before finishing her studies, she went to New York to pursue a literary career. She worked as an Airline reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and British Overseas Airways during the 1950s. In 1959 Lee accompanied Truman Capote to Holcombe, Kansas, as a research assistant for Capote’s classic ‘non-fiction’ novel In Cold Blood (1966).

More details on Lee’s death as they become available.