Harper Lee, Author of 'To Kill a Mockingbird', Dies at 89

Harper Lee, the American novelist, passed away at age 89 on 19 February 2016, as reported by The New York Times. Her 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, sold 10 million copies by the 1970s and became a staple in secondary school curricula across the United States. The book, which depicts a Southern lawyer defending a black man falsely accused of rape in the 1930s Deep South, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. Lee had long insisted she would not publish another work, but in 2015, her agents released Go Set a Watchman, presented as a sequel. This manuscript, written in the 1950s, sparked controversy in literary circles, with critics suggesting it was an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird and raising doubts about Lee's mental capacity to authorize its publication. The novel was loosely inspired by events near her hometown in Alabama.