AUTHOR HARPER LEE has died at the aged of 89.
The Pulitzer Prize winning writer of To Kill A Mockingbird died this morning in her hometown of Monroeville, according to reports from her native Alabama.
Publisher Random House has now confirmed her death.
The news comes just over seven months after her second novel, Go Set A Watchman, was published 55 years after her first.
To Kill A Mockingbird is one of the most famous novels of the 20th century and Lee’s reluctance to speak publicly in the half-century after it was published only added to its cultural impact.
To Kill A Mockingbird told the story of a young girl named Scout who observed the racism in her Alabama hometown during the trial of black man for raping a white woman.
The young girl in the story would be a contemporary of Lee’s, and as a result she was always closely associated with her famous literary creation.
A film of the same name was released in 1962 with Gregory Peck starring as Scout’s father, the lawyer Atticus Finch.
In her later years, Lee was at the centre of a legal battle over the copyright to her work.
Particularly, whether or not she consented to the release of the follow-up she had written almost 60 years previously.
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