Harper Lee dead at 89: Remembering the author's legacy
"She's an inspiration for people who are trying to achieve something that seems impossible," Robert Astudillo, 27, a Jersey City high school English teacher, said at the Strand Bookstore near Union Square.
"It's a book that's going to outlive us all," he said referring to "To Kill a Mockingbird."
"Mockingbird" was loosely based on Lee's childhood in the tiny town of Monroeville.
"Ms. Lee changed America for the better," President Obama said in a statement. "And there is no higher tribute we can offer her than to keep telling this timeless American story."
The book, narrated by 6-year-old Scout Finch, revolves around a racially-polarizing trial in a fictional Alabama town.
Amid threats and public scorn, Scout's lawyer father, Atticus Finch, heroically defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman.
The enigmatic author was born Nelle Harper Lee in April 1926, the youngest of four children. She dropped her given first name when "Mockingbird" was published because she was convinced readers would pronounce it "Nellie," a name she despised.
Her father was a lawyer; her mother a homemaker.
Lee was a tough little tomboy known for roughing up local boys. One of her frequent targets was Truman Capote, who became a close friend.
Lee was working as an airline reservations agent in Manhattan in the early 1950s — but she longed for a career as a writer.
She got her chance in 1956 when her friends Joy and Michael Brown — believing she had great talent — gifted her a year's worth of salary.
Lee's manuscript reached publishing house J.B. Lippincott, in 1957.
Editor Tay Hohoff helped Lee in crafting what would become one of America's most celebrated novels.
Lee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year.
The film adaptation of the novel, with Gregory Peck playing the role of Atticus, opened on Christmas Day 1962.
It was an instant hit, and Peck was awarded an Oscar for best actor.
Just before the novel went to publication, Lee often accompanied Capote to a small town in Kansas where he was researching a murder that later became the basis of his famous book "In Cold Blood."
She later garnered headlines in 1966 after a Virginia school board voted to ban "To Kill a Mockingbird," calling the book "immoral."
An outraged Lee, in a letter to the Richmond News Leader, mercilessly ripped the officials.
"Recently, I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board's activities, and what I've heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read," she wrote.
Lee went on to compare the board members to Orwellian dictators. She concluded her epic takedown by enclosing "a small contribution … that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice."
By the late 1960s, Lee had almost completely withdrawn from public view.
She surfaced in 2007 to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush.
That same year, she cheekily declined a request to address the audience at ceremony inducting new members into the Alabama Academy of Honor.
"Well, it's better to be silent than to be a fool," she said.
"Lee was a brilliant writer but what many don't know is that she was an extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness," said Michael Morrison, head of the HarperCollins U.S. general books group.
"She lived her life the way she wanted to — in private — surrounded by books and the people who loved her."