Letters that Harper Lee wrote to a friend sold for over Rs 800,000 at auction

The letters span the period from December 2005 to May 2010 and include a note written on January 20, 2009, the day Barack Obama was inaugurated as the USA’s first black president.

A batch of letters hand written by To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee has sold for more than $12,000 (Rs 770,690 approx). A statement from the Los Angeles-based Nate D. Sanders Auctions says 38 letters from the deceased novelist to friend Felic Itzkoff went for $12,500 (Rs 802,800 approx) in a sale held yesterday night.

Harper Lee is known for her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. (AFP)

The letters span the period from December 2005 to May 2010 and include a note written on January 20, 2009, the day Barack Obama was inaugurated as the nation’s first black president. The auction company says other letters talked about Lee’s Southern heritage; her father; and Christianity and her apparent atheism.

Lee died in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in February 2016 about seven months after publishing Go Set a Watchman, a companion book to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

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