Harper Lee Dead at 89

Harper Lee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill a Mockingbird, is dead at the age of 89, multiple sources from her Alabama hometown tell AL.com. Lee, born in Monroeville as Nelle Harper Lee in 1926, moved to New York in 1949 and got a job as an airlines reservations clerk while writing on the side. She submitted the Mockingbird manuscript eight years later. LB Lippincott & Co. asked her to rewrite it, and it was eventually published in 1960. It won the Pulitzer Prize the next year, and the movie version was released in 1962.

Lee returned to Monroeville to help her ailing older sister, Alice. In 2007, Lee herself suffered a stroke. No further details of her death or any services that might be planned have yet been announced. A Broadway version of Mockingbird is on the way, and Lee's lawyer says there might be a third Lee book out there that bridges the events of Mockingbird and the recently published—and controversial—Go Set a Watchman. (More Harper Lee stories.)