Harper Lee: 5 Facts About 'To Kill A Mockingbird' Author
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Pulitzer prize winning novelist Harper Lee, author of the American classic "To Kill a Mockingbird," has died at the age of 89, according to a CBS affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama.
Here are 5 things you may not know about Lee:
1: Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama.
2: At the age of 23, Lee moved to NYC and worked for several years as a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines.
3: In 1956, Lee worked with her friend Truman Capote as a research assistant for an article he was working on regarding the murders of a family in a small Kansas town. The article later became the blockbuster non-fiction novel "In Cold Blood."
4: "To Kill A Mockingbird" was not the first novel Lee wrote, but was the first novel Lee published in 1960. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Her first novel "Go Set A Watchman" was thought lost but was discovered in a safe deposit box many years later and was published in July, 2015.
5: President George W. Bush presented Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007.