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The famed author of To Kill A Mockingbird died Friday at age 89.
Harper Lee, the novelist from Alabama who captivated America and the world with tales of bravery in the face of bigotry, died on Friday at age 89.
Lee accepts an award in 2007 at the Davis Theater in Montgomery, Ala.
P Photo/Kevin Glackmeyer
Lee's first novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, is considered one of the great works of 20th century American literature. It is also widely taught in schools, which made it especially popular among young people.
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The world knows Harper Lee was a brilliant writer but what many don't know is that she was an extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness," Michael Morrison, the president of HarperCollins US, said in the statement. "She lived her life the way she wanted to- in private- surrounded by books and the people who loved her. I will always cherish the time I spent with her.
"It was weird not being the heavyweight champion of the world any longer, but in my mind it was a fluke. I knew that God didn't pick on any small animals, that lightning only struck the biggest animals, that those are the only ones that vex God. Minor animals don't get God upset. God has to keep the big animals in check so they won't get lofty on their thrones. I just lay in bed and thought that I had become so big that God was jealous of me."
"Just to have one year of living Mike Tyson, the champ's life, I would be a bum sicking rat piss in the gutter. Shit, yeah."
Jon Levy / AFP / Getty Images
Mike on women:
"What am I doing being married with kids? I'm a street dog, I'm not a house dog. If I still thought in my mind that I was this hoe-entangling motherfucker with the big schlong I wouldn't live like this."
"I was once talking to a girl for hours and finally she said, 'Hey, listen, I'm just going to get in this car and come over to your apartment.' In my head I was going, Thank God. Oh, thank God. And I sprayed the deodorant thing even though my house looked good and I got my condoms and some porn movies out. Everything was ready. I was just so happy."
"So I went back to the hotel with four girls. We were getting high on coke and liquor. We were having fun and one of the girls called her mother.
'Ma, I'm here with Mike Tyson!'
She was so excited. She told me her mother was really hot too. But four was enough."
"I also got tons of sympathy pussy. Women would approach me and say, 'Oh, God, I can't believe what the horrible woman did to you. Please let me hold you, let me suck your dick, let me take care of you.' I'd say, 'No, ma'am, that's alright, no. OK, well, just suck it a little, ma'am, not much.'"
AFP / Getty Images
Mike on being your own worst enemy:
"'I think he likes you,' Bobby said. 'If you're not a prick and an asshole, this will go well.' I could tell Bobby was happy for me."
"All of my heroes were truly miserable bastard, and I emulated them my whole career, a hundred percent, but I was never really one of those guys. I wish I was, but I wasn't."
"There was no one more desperate than me on the face of the planet. The only people that could outdo me were pedophiles or pansexuals. Pansexuals were people that could hit a deer, kill it, take it home, and fuck it."
John Gurzinski / AFP / Getty Images
Mike on drugs:
"I wanted to go out and party, so I opened one of my suitcases and saw that my clothes were wrinkled. I panicked. My head started hurting, my heart started racing, and I freaked out. I was high as a kite when I called my butler. 'I NEED SOMEBODY UP HERE TO IRON MY PANTS, NOW!!! NOW, NOW!!!!'"
"I would get so fucked in Phoenix that I would start hallucinating. One time, I was in a car, and my assistant Darryl was driving. We were coming up to one of my friend's houses and I said to Darryl, 'Look! There are all these people outside the house waving at us.' There weren't no people, it was the trees' branches moving from the wind."
John Gurzinski / AFP / Getty Images
Mike on money:
[On his bankruptcy] "Some of the money might have gone to the Unanticipated Consequences of Getting Shitfaced Fund."
"I was a real adaptable kind of guy. I could live in the gutter or in an elevated state. I knew all the hustles and I was gambling with life. Even when I was in the gutter, I still had my $2000 pants and shoes on."
"I was so poor that a guy who had stolen my credit card account number went online to complain that I was so broke he couldn't even pay for dinner with my credit card."
John Gruzinski / AFP / Getty Images
Mike on lawsuits:
"So I picked up the mink coat, pulled down my pants, and wiped my ass with his mink. By now the sun had come up and there were a lot of people going to work and the buses were driving past and the whole club had spilled out onto the sidewalk and everyone was watching me wipe my ass with his coat….
Four months later, Rose filed a $66 million lawsuit against me. He wanted money for attempted assault on him and actual assault on his mink coat."
"But right after I got back, Monica filed for divorce. I guess she had enough of my fooling around, because I sure did a lot of it. Calling to tell her I had AIDS probably didn't help either."
"'He's so gorgeous. He's six weeks old and twelve pounds. He can already sit up! I live for my son.'
A few months after the fight, my buttocks case finally came to a conclusion."
AFP / Getty Images
Mike on religion:
"Bottom line, I don't want to go to heaven if it means I'm going to be alone. I'm serious, take me to hell where all my friends are, where the people I knew and respected when I was living are going to be."
"One day I'd be in the sewage with some street hooker trying to get her to have sex without a condom, and the next night I'd be in Bel-Air with my rich friends with a happy face on, celebrating Rosh Hashanah."
"We were created in God's likeness? We can't even think that we're on his level. Is God a pig, a liar, a pervert? That's what we are. We're sex addicts, drug addicts, control freaks, manipulators, and narcissists. If this is what God is, we're fucked."
In the dark days before Tumblr, online fan cultures existed mainly on that vale of tears, LiveJournal, and the only place to post your fan fiction stories was FanFiction.net (tagline: unleash your imagination). That site still exists and thrives today, but fic writers can now also post work on the infinitely cooler Archive of Our Own ("AO3", if you’re in the know) or the weird and wide-ranging Wattpad.
But 10 years ago, in 2006, there was only FF.net, and it was there that a fan fiction legend was born: Tara Gilesbie (aka XXXbloodyrists666XXX) published the first chapter of My Immortal – a multi-chaptered Harry Potter story about a young American Hogwarts student called Ebony, a leather-clad, eyelinered "goffik" who has a relationship with Draco Malfoy and later is sent back in time to curb Voldemort’s murderous urges with the love of a goff woman. To be honest, the chaotic plotlines of My Immortal make a quick synopsis tricky.
It began with a paragraph that was to become as enduring as the work’s title promised.
“Hi my name is Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Amy Lee (AN: if u don’t know who she is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to Gerard Way but I wish I was because he’s a major fucking hottie.”
All the familiar characters are here, although obscured by many, many confusing name changes: the story's "goff" theme means Harry becomes Vampire Potter, Hermione is reborn as B’loody Mary Smith, and Ron Weasley is known as Diabolo. There’s even a dedicated wiki to keep track of it all.
That first chapter was only 200 words long, most of which were a lavish description of Ebony’s outfit (bought at Hot Topic – presumably there was a Hogsmeade branch). But then the story kept going: chapter after chapter of jaw-dropping, hilarious, and baffling prose until the entire thing stood at 44 chapters and 20,000 words of hysterical, typo-laden hyperbole.
It is 44 chapters and 20,000 words of hysterical, typo-laden hyperbole.
Who could forget such gems as these? “Draco took all his cloves off.” And: “Then I looked out the window and screamed… Snap was spying on me and he was taking a video tape of me! And Loopin was masticating to it! They were sitting on their broomsticks.” Or even: “'What the fuck r u doing!' I shooted arngrily. Snoop laughed meanly. He polled down his pants. I gasped – there was a Dork Mark on his you-know-wut!11!”
I’d been part of the Harry Potter community since 2001. By 2006 – when I'd had my kids – I was less active in fandom than I’d been for a while, so it took me a while to notice My Immortal. Back then Harry Potter fandom was in full swing: The movies were still in cinemas and fans were reeling from Dumbledore’s death, while breathlessly awaiting the final book in the series.
Maritsa Patrinos / BuzzFeed
Even back then, "My Immortal" stood out as something special
The exact date of the first chapter of My Immortal’s publication is unknown (many details of the story’s creation and early publication are shrouded in mystery, or the details are lost, like master tapes of old TV shows that were thought unimportant; no one was recording what was going on on FanFiction.net 10 years ago). There was no reason to pay My Immortal any attention at all. At the time, the sub-genre of Harry Potter fan fiction My Immortal fell into – sassy American student goes to Hogwarts, meets all the characters, and has adventures with some of them – was hugely popular. So much so that a dedicated LiveJournal, Pottersues, kept track of them. It was on Pottersues that I first noticed the story, by which time it already had 2,000 incredulous reviews on FF.net. Pottersues described the fic as “a thing of beauty" – even in the hailstorm of self-indulgent, badly written fan fiction that characterised Harry Potter fandom in the mid-'00s, My Immortal stood out as something special.
Make no mistake, My Immortal is not a well-written piece of fan fiction. But there is something desperately compelling about it: from the author’s notes thanking Gilesbie’s best friend Raven for her help with spelling (what would it have been like without her?) to the dramatic moment when a disparager of the work appears to hack Gilesbie’s account and starts publishing their own parody chapters.
The general sense of unreality occurs and reoccurs in the legend of My Immortal. The “hacking” incident (which some people believe was Gilesbie herself) makes it hard to even be sure which parts are written by Gilesbie and which aren't, and to this day no one has admitted to being the work’s author despite its notoriety. It’s hard to track down the full text online (it was mysteriously removed and reposted several times over). Is the work unintentionally hilarious or a deliberate parody? Who can tell?
Whatever its intent, it is a work of comic genius. I am a professional comedy writer and I sometimes get actually angry that I will never, ever write anything as funny as the bit in My Immortal where Ebony and Draco Malfoy get it on in the woods only to be intruded upon, with this:
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!”
It was…………………………………………………….Dumbledore!
Or the moment when Ebony, Draco, Harry, and Hermione’s goff band rehearsal is interrupted thusly:
“I MAY BE A HOGWARTS STUDENT….” Hargirid paused angrily. “BUT I AM ALSO A SATANIST!”
Actually (spoiler alert), it turns out everyone is a Satanist. Also, everyone's a goffik. Even Dumbledore turns up in an Avril Lavigne T-shirt. Our heroine, Ebony, ends up in a love triangle with Harry and Draco, who are ex-lovers. But, of course, her true destiny is to fight and defeat Voldemort using her sex appeal.
Last year, I was asked to read a piece in a show called Bad Book Club, where performers read extracts from terrible books. Straightaway I thought of reading a piece of My Immortal, because of its reputation. When I revisited it for the show, I was amazed by how relentlessly hilarious it was – and how oddly touching.
A young girl creating a piece of work where she is the hero is a radical act.
The story, and the character of Ebony, is an example of “Mary Sue” fan fiction, i.e. a story where the author inserts a thinly veiled version of herself into the text and makes herself the hero. Most authors of fan fiction are women, and Mary Sue fanfic in particular is often written by teenage girls (and in keeping with the grand tradition of pouring scorn on things teenage girls like, it's the target of a lot of bile). My Immortal may not be a good piece of work, but it is an important one: A young girl creating a piece of work where she is the hero is a radical act.
Like a lot of great literary epics, we don’t have a definitive version of the text. It’s like the writing of some ancient culture. In fact, the typos make it seem like it’s written in another language sometimes (“c dats basically nut swering and dis time he wuz relly upset n u wil c y”). But I think if My Immortal had genuinely been written as a joke and had reached this level of success and notoriety, the author would have come forward. Maybe I just want to believe. Because My Immortal is important to me.
My whole life in fandom is important to me, and that began in the Harry Potter fandom. I can’t reread My Immortal without being reminded that some of the first people to know I was pregnant were my online fandom friends. Fandom friends I’d never met in real life sent gifts for my daughter when she was born – people I am still friends with now that daughter is 13 and in fandoms of her own. Fandom has gone on to take up a truly shocking amount of my time (I’ve had to block Tumblr to get this written). People have literally given me writing jobs because I understand fandom; I run a popular live literature night about fan fiction, and I met my girlfriend through running it. Fandom is a huge and important part of my life, and I feel sure it must have been to the author of My Immortal too.
Last summer's reading went down so well that to celebrate 10 years of My Immortal this year, I’m going to be performing a live reading of the whole thing at Brighton Fringe. I’m a professional writer – I’m not entirely sure what it might do to my ability to make nice sentences if I deliberately put the worst writing in the world into my head. But in the same way that Tara Gilesbie put herself into the story of Harry Potter, I am going to put myself into the story of My Immortal. Because stories are powerful. Even stories where the important plotlines are delivered with sentences like: "U must stab Vrompire" and "If u don't then I'll rap Draco!1".
Stories are most meaningful when we see ourselves in them. The majority of our most famous stories are about straight white men and a lot of fan fiction exists to try to subvert this in some small way. In My Immortal, Tara Gilesbie created a version of herself – Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way – and put her right in the centre of Hogwarts along with all the silly, brilliant, trivial things she cared about. And the fact that this story has come to be acknowledged as the worst, but also one of the most important pieces of fan fiction ever written is utterly heartwarming.
We all know about the Harry Potter series. Everyone in the whole world seems to love it. Or whatever.
Warner Bros.
Firstly, after you read Harry Potter, you spend the rest of your life waiting for a Hogwarts letter. Even when you're old enough to have left Hogwarts.
Look, I might be 21, but that doesn't mean my Hogwarts letter won't ever come, right? Right?
Warner Bros.
You'll never get to go shopping on Diagon Alley.
Bookstores are great, but they're nothing compared to Flourish and Blotts.
BECAUSE CURSED CHILD IS NOT THE EIGHTH HARRY POTTER BOOK!
If you ask any hardcore Harry Potter fan for their deepest desire, it's almost definitely going to be for J.K. Rowling to write another book set in the Wizarding World.
Warner Bros.
Whether you're clamouring for a Mauraders-era prequel...
Warner Bros.
...a sequel following the second generation at Hogwarts...
Harper Lee — the Alabama author whose book To Kill A Mockingbird, exploring racism and prejudice in the Deep South, is regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written — died Friday at age 89.
The mayor's office of Monroeville, Alabama, Lee's hometown, confirmed her death to BuzzFeed News. AL.com first reported the death, saying it was confirmed by multiple sources in Monroeville.
Though she didn't publish another book for over half a century after Mockingbird was released in 1960, Lee was viewed as one of the giants of American literature.
Her novel was studied by school students the world over and reprinted tens of millions of times. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1961, and was honored by President George W. Bush in 2007 with the Presidential Medal Of Freedom and by President Barack Obama in 2010 the National Medal of Arts for her contributions to literature.
After withdrawing from public life for decades, Lee surprised the literary world by publishing her second novel, Go Set A Watchman, in 2015. The enormous excitement around the release of the book, which followed the same beloved characters from Mockingbird some two decades later, was a testament to the central place Lee's first novel occupied in the American literary canon — and in the hearts of readers.
"A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of a new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird," read the Washington Post review of the novel upon its release.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Nelle Harper Lee was born April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, a small town that would prove formative in her writing and which was, in 1997, officially proclaimed by Alabama lawmakers to be the state's literary capital, having also played home to a young Truman Capote.
"In my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read," Lee wrote in a letter to Oprah Winfrey for the talk-show host's magazine in 2006. "A movie? Not often — movies weren't for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We're talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression."
"Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember a time when you didn't know how?" she wrote, recalling being read daily stories from her mother, Frances Finch, while her lawyer father, Amasa Coleman Lee, would read to her from "the four newspapers he got through every evening."
Lee in 1963.
Like her father, she went on to study law at the University of Alabama, but left for New York in 1949 before completing a degree. With dreams of pursuing a literary career, she wrote in her spare time while working as an airline reservations clerk.
In 1957 she delivered a manuscript for Watchman to her literary agent, who sold it on to the publishing house J. B. Lippincott Company. Her editor, Therese von Hohoff Torrey, immediately sensed the makings of a rare talent, but worked with Lee on reimagining the work through a series of drafts. “I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told,” Lee later said. Frustrated by her own attempts to reshape the book, Lee at one stage was said to have tearfully thrown the manuscript out the window, before her editor urged her to salvage it from the snowy street.
What emerged was Mockingbird, a novel with the same characters as Watchman but set decades earlier and drastically revised. Set in a fictional Alabama town during the Great Depression, Mockingbird followed the childhood adventures of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, her brother Jem, and their neighborhood friend Dill Harris, a surrogate for Capote. As the children investigate their myserious neighbor, Boo Radley, Scout and Jem's lionhearted father, Atticus nobly defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman.
Full of sage advice for his young daughter, Atticus instantly became an iconic literary paragon of wisdom and virtue. "“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view," he tells Scout in one oft-quoted section, "until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Some 80 weeks after its publication, still a national bestseller and a staple of reading lists across the country, the novel won Lee the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. A 1991 survey by the Book Of The Month Club found Mockingbird ranked second only to the Bible in terms of "making a difference in people's lives."
"It was one of sheer numbness. It was like being hit over the head and knocked cold," Lee said of the novel's enormous success. "I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected."
A 1962 film version starring Gregory Peck as Atticus further entrenched the novel's place in the canon — while also earning Peck an Oscar. Lee described being unsure initially if Peck was the right choice for the role, but having her doubts immediately put to rest when she saw him in costume during a test on the studio backlot. "It was the most amazing transformation I had ever seen." she told Roy Newquist in 1964. "The minute I saw him I knew everything was going to be all right because he was Atticus.
For decades, Lee was lauded with honorary degrees and inundated with interview requests, but she declined to speak publicly, instead preferring to maintain her privacy and enjoy life in small town Alabama, alongside her oldest sister Alice.
“When you have hit the pinnacle, how would you feel about writing more?” Alice Lee told the Chicago Tribune in 2002 of her sister's decision not to write again. “Would you feel like you’re competing with yourself?”
In 2013, Lee sued her literary agent, Samuel Pinkus, for allegedly stealing Mockingbird royalties from her novel, claiming he had taken advantage of her physical disadvantages after she suffered a stroke. The parties settled the lawsuit later that year.
After Alice's death in 2014 at age 103, Lee stunned the literary word by announcing in February 2015 the publication of a second novel, Go Set A Watchman.
In a statement through her publisher at the time, Lee said the work had been recently rediscovered by an old friend and lawyer, Tonja Carter. "After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication," she said. "I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years."
But the story behind the release of Watchman quickly grew contentious, with some suggesting Lee was not mentally sound or being manipulated by others around her. Alabama officials launched an inquiry into possible financial fraud, but found no evidence of elder abuse. Many, though, were still not satisfied, believing Lee's frailty had been taken advantage of.
Lucas Jackson / Reuters
As the book made its way to shelves, though, public attention quickly turned to the dramatically different portrait of Atticus Finch that Lee had painted. Watchman, written before Mockingbird, sees Finch return to her hometown as a young women to find her father a cranky old bigot who once attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting.
"The depiction of Atticus in Watchman makes for disturbing reading, and for Mockingbird fans, it’s especially disorienting," New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote in her review.
Some Mockingbird fans avoided reading the book altogether or debated whether it could indeed be considered a true 'sequel', while others who had named their children and pets after Atticus faced an even more awkward dilemma.
The book, while a commercial success, could never possibly have reached the same iconic status as Mockingbird. Atticus Finch, despite Lee's secondary portrait, remains a central figure in American literature — so beloved that not even the author herself can challenge his status.
"One reason To Kill a Mockingbird succeeded is the wise and kind heart of the author, which comes through on every page," President Bush said while awarding Lee the presidential medal in 2007. "This daughter of Monroeville, Alabama had something to say about honor, and tolerance, and, most of all, love — and it still resonates.
"To Kill a Mockingbird has influenced the character of our country for the better. It's been a gift to the entire world," he said.
For Lee, though, her aspirations were always much smaller.
Speaking to Newquist in 1964, she admitted her objectives as a writer were limited to exploring the small slice of Southern life in which she grew up. "I would like to leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world," she said.
"In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama."
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Readers, Friends, Writers And Celebrities Remember Harper Lee