This morning, word came that Harper Lee, the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” had died, at the age of eighty-nine. Lee was one of the most important and one of the most mysterious figures in American literary history. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960, became, for many readers, one of the key novels about race in America. (The film version, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, is an equally immovable cultural touchstone.) And yet, despite her success, Lee lived in relative seclusion, in her home town of Monroeville, Alabama. She didn’t publish another novel until last year, when “Go Set a Watchman,” a prequel to “Mockingbird,” appeared. In a review of that novel, Adam Gopnik considered the “extraordinary hold” that “Mockingbird” has on our collective imagination. It wasn’t just that the book treated race in an unusually incisive way, he wrote; readers treasured it for “the intensity of [its] evocation of coming of age, and of the feel of streets and summers at that moment. Harper Lee did for Maycomb (her poeticized version of her home town, Monroeville, Alabama) what J. D. Salinger did for Central Park—made it a permanent amphitheatre of American adolescence.”
Below, you’ll find a selection of pieces about Harper Lee and her legacy. There will be more to come in the next few days.
July 27, 2015: “Sweet Home Alabama”
Adam Gopnik’s review of “Go Set a Watchman.”
July 17, 2015: “The Atticus We Always Knew”
Dale Russakoff on the realities of race in Harper Lee’s South.
June 8, 2015: “Yours Truly”
Rebecca Mead on an auction of Lee’s papers.
March 17, 2015: “Harper Lee’s Abandoned True-Crime Novel”
Case N. Cep on a book that never materialized.
February 20, 2015: “Mystery in Monroeville”
Casey N. Cep on the controversy surrounding Lee’s new novel.
March 6, 2014: “How To Be a Good Bad American Girl”
Anna Holmes on Scout as a model of enlightened, audacious girlhood.
August 10, 2009: “The Courthouse Ring”
Malcolm Gladwell on the sociology of race in “Mockingbird.”
May 29, 2006: “Big Bird”
Thomas Mallon’s review of “Mockingbird,” a biography of Lee.