Watch 'Mockingbird' author Harper Lee's (1926-2016) last public interview – in 1964
"She took the worst of us and the best of us, and made it clear which one we wanted to be."
"Well my reaction to it was not one of surprise, it was one of sheer numbness. It was one of being hit over the head and knocked cold," Nelle Harper Lee said in her last public interview when asked about the enormous success of her first and, until 2015, only book, To Kill a Mockingbird.
A semi-autobiographical telling through six-year-old Scout Finch's perspective, it is set in the America of the mid-1930s, rife with racism and struggling under the Great Depression. The novel is the story of her lawyer father's defence of a black man accused of raping a white woman in a small town in the southern state of Alabama.
Lee died on Friday at the age of 89 in an assisted-living facility in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama where she had been living for the past few years.
To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, is often described as the "perfect" book. Its characters are now a part of the American cultural landscape. Oprah Winfrey even called it the national novel of America.
A 1962 film adaptation took the story to more people and established its place firmly in American culture. The book is believed to be one of the finest accounts of racism in America in the 1930s.
In 2014, news of another book by her, the manuscript for which had been languishing since 1957, came to the surface. The news of a second book by Lee was shocking to many, since the reclusive author had said several times that she wouldn't ever publish again.
That book, Go Set a Watchman, is a less loved one. Scout is now a 26-year-old woman paying a visit home, where her father Atticus and brother Jem live, with Atticus being seen in a murky, racist light.
A New York Times review of the book says that Lee's publisher suggested had she take her character two decades back, and that was how Mockingbird came to be.
The autobiographical aspects of Mockingbird, are hard to ignore. People from her hometown say they could identify the people mentioned and that in the film adaptation, the court was an exact replica of the court of Monroeville.
Lee's childhood friend Truman Capote, author of books like In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's, is said to have featured in Mockingbird as Dill Harris. Capote was small as a kid, and much like Scout in the book, Lee was his protector against bullies.
Neighbour and best friend for many years, Lee helped Capote in the writing of his book In Cold Blood. Some speculate that the two fell out because he did not credit her involvement in the book, while others said that while he enjoyed celebrityhood, Lee withdrew from publicity. Yet others claim that they just drifted apart.
In the 2005 film Capote, Lee's character was played by actress Catherine Keener.
