NEW YORK - Harper Lee has died, but the conversation about her life and work has only begun.

Lee's death Friday at age 89 comes almost exactly a year after her publisher, HarperCollins, stunned the world by announcing that a second novel by the author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" would be released, ending what many believed was a permanent and much-desired literary silence.

Ralph Eubanks, a former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review and currently a visiting professor of Southern studies at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, says the brilliance of "Mockingbird" was in how it could make anyone from the North or South identify with the issues and with the characters.