From WIAT
Dr. Cathy Randall, the retired director of the University of Alabama’s Honors Program, first met famed author, Harper Lee, at a university event in the late 1980’s.
“What a blessing–that she called me friend for another 35 years,” said Randall.
Randall said she had permission from family to speak with reporters in the hours after Harper Lee’s death. While Lee is considered an alumni of Huntingdon College, she also attended the University of Alabama from 1946 to 1949 while she was in law school, and wrote for the university’s newspaper and a humor magazine called the “Rammer Jammer.”
Randall just saw Lee a few weeks ago.
“She was always the most brilliant person in any room,” she said. “The topics in which she was interested in, and in which she was expert were unfathomably broad. She loved literature obviously–loved 19th century British literature and history, but she loved sports. She loved science. She even loved math! There was nothing intellectual in which she was not interested and in which she did not become expert–because of her interest.”
As for why so many people feel drawn to Harper Lee, Randall theorizes, it because of exactly what she would have wanted: her work.
“But to watch her with young people…her compassion for them, her capacity to encourage them, particularly those who were budding writers,” said Randall. “As you know, we established a Harper Lee essay contest here at the University of Alabama and she would come every year and would just light up when she met these young people.”
According to Randall – one thing that not many people know about Lee, is the fact that she had just recently sponsored a performance of King Lear with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.
“She was reciting it along with the cast. The woman’s mind was just something beautiful to behold.”
Randall says it was her passion for her work that made her shy away from the limelight as a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist. “She wanted the work to speak for itself, and for that to happen she had to guard her privacy, and she cherished that privacy. What she would want today is for us to look at the work and to let that work be the testimony to her life.”
The Dean from the University of Alabama’s School of Law released a statement this afternoon.
“We at the University of Alabama School of Law were saddened to hear of the passing of Nelle Harper Lee,” said Dean Mark E. Brandon. “Her death is a loss not only to the School of Law, which she attended, but also to the state of Alabama, the nation, and the world. In To Kill a Mockingbird, she penned a novel of elegant prose, set in the granular relations of a small Southern town, but eloquently touching themes of universal significance. In her life and work, she showed that she had both a keen eye and an unwavering moral voice.”
The University of Alabama also released a statement.
The University of Alabama extends its sympathy to Nelle Harper Lee’s family and friends and the millions of readers of To Kill a Mockingbird. Miss Lee will continue to serve as an inspiration for many generations of writers, and we proudly claim her as one of our own.