NEW YORK — Harper Lee, the elusive novelist whose child's-eye view of racial injustice in a small Southern town, "To Kill a Mockingbird," became standard reading for millions of young people and an Oscar-winning film, has died. She was 89.

Lee died Friday, publisher HarperCollins said in a statement. It did not give any details about how she died.

"The world knows Harper Lee was a brilliant writer, but what many don't know is that she was an extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness. She lived her life the way she wanted to — in private — surrounded by books and the people who loved her," Michael Morrison, head of HarperCollins U.S. general books group, said in the statement.

For most of her life, Lee divided her time between New York City, where she wrote the novel in the 1950s, and her Alabama hometown, which inspired the book's fictional Maycomb.

"To Kill a Mockingbird," published in 1960, is the story of a girl nicknamed Scout growing up in a Depression-era Southern town. A black man has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and Scout's father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, defends him despite threats and the scorn of many.

The book quickly became a best-seller, won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie in 1962, with Gregory Peck winning an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus. As the civil rights movement grew, the novel inspired a generation of young lawyers and was assigned in schools all over the country.

By 2015, its sales were reported by HarperCollins to be more than 40 million worldwide, making it one of the most widely read American novels of the 20th century. When the Library of Congress did a survey in 1991 on books that have affected people's lives, "To Kill a Mockingbird" was second only to the Bible.

Lee herself became more mysterious as her book became more famous. She began declining interviews in the late 1960s and, until late in her life, firmly avoided making any public comment about her novel or her career. Other than a few magazine pieces for Vogue and McCall's in the 1960s and a review of a 19th-century Alabama history book in 1983, she published no other book until stunning the world in 2015 by permitting "Go Set a Watchman" to be released.

"Watchman" was written before "Mockingbird" but was set 20 years later, using the same location and many of the same characters. Readers and reviewers were disheartened to find an Atticus who seemed nothing like the hero of the earlier book. The man who defied the status quo in "Mockingbird" was now part of the mob in "Watchman," denouncing blacks as unfit to enjoy full equality.

But despite unenthusiastic reviews and questions whether Lee was well enough to approve the publication, "Watchman" jumped to the top of best-seller lists within a day of its announcement and remained there for months.

Story: Kendal Weaver / Associated Press

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ROME — Italian author Umberto Eco, who intrigued, puzzled and delighted readers worldwide with his best-selling historical novel "The Name of the Rose," has died.

Spokeswoman Lori Glazer of Eco's American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, told The Associated Press that Eco died Friday at 84. She could not immediately confirm the cause of death or where he died.

Author of a wide range of books, Eco was fascinated with the obscure and the mundane, and his books were both engaging narratives and philosophical and intellectual exercises. The bearded, heavy-set scholar, critic and novelist took on the esoteric theory of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols in language; on popular culture icons like James Bond; and on the technical languages of the Internet.

"The Name of the Rose" transformed him from academic to international celebrity, especially after the medieval thriller set in a monastery was made into a film starring Sean Connery in 1986. "The Name of the Rose" sold millions of copies, a feat for a narrative filled with partially translated Latin quotes and puzzling musings on the nature of symbols. But Eco talked about his inspiration with characteristic irony: "I began writing … prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk."

His second novel, the 1988 "Foucault's Pendulum," a byzantine tale of plotting publishers and secret sects also styled as a thriller, was successful, too —though it was so complicated that an annotated guide accompanied it to help the reader follow the plot.

In 2000, when awarding Eco Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize for communications, the jury praised his works "of universal distribution and profound effect that are already classics in contemporary thought."

Eco was born Jan. 5, 1932 in Alessandria, a town east of Turin; he said the reserved culture there was a source for his "world vision: a skepticism and an aversion to rhetoric." He received a university degree in philosophy from the University of Turin in 1954, beginning his fascination with the Middle Ages and the aesthetics of text. He later defined semiotics as "a philosophy of language."

He had always loved storytelling and as a teenager wrote comic books and fantasy novels.

"I was a perfectionist and wanted to make them look as though they had been printed, so I wrote them in capital letters and made up title pages, summaries, illustrations," he told The Paris Review in 1988. "It was so tiring that I never finished any of them. I was at that time a great writer of unaccomplished masterpieces."

Eco remained involved with academia, becoming the first professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna in 1971. He also lectured at institutions worldwide and was a fellow at elite colleges like Oxford University and Columbia University. Twenty-three institutions had awarded him honorary degrees by 2000.

But Eco was also able to bridge the gap between popular and intellectual culture, publishing his musings in daily newspapers and Italy's leading weekly magazine L'Espresso.

Eco started in journalism in the 1950s, working for the Italian state-owned television RAI. From the 1960s onwards, he wrote columns for several Italian dailies. He also wrote children's books, including "The Bomb and the General" ("La Bomba e il Generale").

In 2003, Eco published a collection of lectures on translations, "Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation," and a year later he wrote the novel "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana," a story about an antiquarian book dealer who loses his memory.

Recent works include "From the Tree to the Labyrinth," an essay on semiology and language published in 2007 and "Turning Back the Clock," a collection of essays on various subjects, ranging from the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, anti-Semitism and his staunch criticism of Silvio Berlusconi's conservative government. His most recent novel, "Numero Zero," came out last year and recalled a political scandal from the 1990s that helped lead to Berlusconi's rise.