Remembering Harper Lee: One of the literary world's most enigmatic stars. To Kill a Mockingbird, has eclipsed Huckleberry Finn in more ways than one as the book of American experience and paradox that almost every school kid reads. By all accounts, she was happy and lively, yet it's hard to consider these the best years of her life. She arrived early in her wisdom. And we caught on slowly. Harper Lee was the rare writer who may have lived too long.