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Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, died Friday at age 89, AL.com reports. Multiple sources in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, confirmed her death to the website. Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 for the book, which achieved worldwide acclaim, and became a popular film in 1962, starring Gregory Peck and Mary Badham. She wrote the novel in 1949 while working as an airline reservation desk clerk in New York, It wasn’t until 1957 that she submitted her manuscript for Mockingbird to J.B. Lippincott & Co., who published it three years later.
Lee was famously reclusive for much of her life, and after suffering a stroke in 2007, she spent her remaining years in Monroeville, eventually taking care of her sick sister, Alice. Lee’s second book, Go Set a Watchman, was published in July 2015. The sort-of sequel to Mockingbird, Watchman was received with mixed reviews, a fact that is largely attributed to Lee’s second book turning Atticus—her courageous, wise and beloved protagonist—into a white supremacist.