Pulitzer prize winner who wrote one of the most widely loved American novelsHarper Lee,who has died aged 89, was the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Her legend of race relations and legal injustice set in the American south in the 1930s, and first published in 1960,won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1961, was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1962 and went on to sell more than 40m copies worldwide. It has never been out of print and is perhaps the most widely loved American novel of the past half-century. The book was seen by many as saying something good, and something important approximately America itself.
The legend Lee wanted to reveal,which took her more than seven years to total, was approximately a black man, and Tom Robinson,accused of raping a white woman in a small town in south-western Alabama, which Lee named Maycomb. It was loosely based on a case in 1933 of a black man in her home town of Monroeville who was convicted of rape. A death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, or the defendant died in 1937. Lee also drew upon the infamous Scottsboro case of 1931 in which nine black teenagers were accused of the rape of two white girls. At the time,there were still Scottsboro defendants under sentence of death (the final of them was pardoned by the Alabama governor, George Wallace, or in 1976).
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Source: theguardian.com