Harper Lee, 89, elusive author of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view," Atticus Finch tells his daughter, Scout, in one of the most memorable passages of the classic novel

To Kill a Mockingbird

- "until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

Few people in the world could claim to really understand Harper Lee, the novel's elusive author, who died Friday at 89 in Monroeville, Ala.

She withdrew from public life shortly after her book was published in 1960, only to reappear in old age with the controversial release of Go Set a Watchman, a manuscript identified as a long-lost early draft of the book that decades earlier had vaulted her to literary renown and, decades later, remained at the center of the discussion of race in America.

To Kill a Mockingbird, a coming-of-age story set in the Depression-era South where Ms. Lee grew up, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and sold more than 40 million copies, becoming one of the most cherished novels in modern American literature. One oft-cited survey asked respondents to name the book that most profoundly affected their lives. Ms. Lee's novel ranked near the top, not far behind the Bible.

The novel arrived on book stands amid the growing movement for civil rights and drew much of its resonance from its hero, Atticus, a lawyer who nobly and futilely defends a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman in their segregated town. For many, Atticus was embodied by actor Gregory Peck, who received an Academy Award for his performance in the 1962 movie based on Ms. Lee's book.

It was widely understood that Ms. Lee modeled Atticus on her father, Amasa Coleman "A.C." Lee, a lawyer who, like his daughter's fictional character, served in the state legislature and favored pocket watches. Scout, the book's narrator, was believed to have been, more or less, Ms. Lee.

In the 55 years between the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird and the release in July 2015 of Go Set a Watchman, few Americans came of age without meeting Atticus; his doomed client, Tom Robinson; Scout and her brother, Jem; their peculiar friend, Dill; and Boo Radley - the mysterious neighborhood shut-in whom the children try to coax from the shadows.

Atticus, in particular, was beloved as the ideal father, even the ideal man in a society that was profoundly flawed, but, through wisdom such as his, perhaps redeemable.

The reverence surrounding Ms. Lee's book compounded the shock, edging on disbelief, when readers learned the contents of Go Set a Watchman, a literary juggernaut preordered online in numbers topped only by the "Harry Potter" series.

Watchman was presented as not strictly a sequel to Mockingbird, but rather an early iteration of the book set in the 1950s. Jem is dead. Scout - properly Jean Louise Finch - is living in New York but home for a visit. Atticus, the white man for whom a courtroom's entire "colored gallery" had risen in respect in Mockingbird, is an arthritic segregationist.

In Watchman, Jean Louise watches her beloved father preside over a White Citizens' Council meeting where a speaker spews invective about blacks who threaten to "mongrelize" the white race.

Atticus asks his daughter: "Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?" And Jean Louise, who loves her father but cannot abide his ideology, tells him at one point, "I despise you and everything you stand for."

Gradually, astonishment surrounding the book gave way to interpretations that perhaps generations of readers of To Kill a Mockingbird had asked too much of Atticus by expecting him, beyond the scope of that book, to be a saint. The man Ms. Lee presented in Mockingbird had represented an innocent defendant with conviction. But that Atticus knew only the American South of the 1930s and before, when neither society's racist structure nor his moral rectitude had yet been challenged by the civil rights movement.

The older Atticus of Watchman, like many white Southerners of his era, appeared to be reeling in the changes brought about by integration. He had gravitated to an ideology made even more abhorrent for many modern readers when he, Atticus, of all men, espoused it.

Questions swirled about the book and its meaning - and about the competency of Ms. Lee, who by then was reported to be largely deaf and blind. How could the Atticus of Mockingbird be reconciled with the bigot of Watchman, or should any such reconciliation be attempted? Had Ms. Lee been manipulated into releasing an abandoned manuscript that might irrevocably alter her legacy - or, with questions of race still raw in America, did she once again have some message to impart?

Few people held out hope for complete answers. With her retreat into private life in the mid-1960s, Ms. Lee had become one of the great literary enigmas of the 20th century. Often she was called a recluse, a description that was intriguing but inaccurate. Lee - Nelle Harper or just Nelle to friends - simply rejected celebrity.

For years she divided her time between New York City and Monroeville, where she shared a house with her sister Alice Finch Lee, a lawyer who managed Nelle's affairs and acted as a gatekeeper, usually keeping the gate closed to would-be interviewers. Harper Lee had guarded her anonymity so vigilantly, it was said, that she could roam Manhattan without being recognized.

Nelle Harper Lee - the youngest of four children, the granddaughter of a Confederate soldier and the descendant of slaveholders - was born April 28, 1926, in Monroeville. The town served as a model for the fictional hamlet of Maycomb that was the locus of both Mockingbird and Watchman.