MONROEVILLE, Ala., Nov. 18 (UPI) -- Alice Lee, who retired from practicing law at the age of 100 and served as attorney for her celebrated younger sister, Harper Lee, has died at the age of 103.
Lee's death Monday was announced by the Johnsonville Funeral Home in Monroeville, Ala., the town where Lee spent her life.
Alice Lee was born in 1911 in Monroeville, where her father practiced law. Amasa Coleman Lee later became the model for Atticus Finch, the hero of Harper's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Her education was interrupted by financial problems during the Depression. But in 1943, she was admitted to the bar and her father asked her to join his firm.
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Lee told an interviewer for the Daily Beast in 2011 that she had some questions.
"When you grow up in one town, you are always Mr. Lee's little girl. 'Would I be an adult separate and apart from you?' Daddy said, 'I think you've been gone long enough for that not to happen,'" she said.
Lee remained with the firm for the rest of her career.
Her nephew, Hank Conner, said that Alice played a critical role in the creation of Mockingbird. Harper, 15 years younger, was living in New York, where she worked taking reservations for BOAC and wrote at night, and would send bundles of manuscript back to Monroeville.
"Alice is a very good editor and a very good copy editor," Conner said.
Harper never published another book. But her account of a young black man's trial became a best-seller, won the Pulitzer Prize and brought in millions of dollars in royalties.
After Harper returned to Monroeville, she stopped giving interviews. Alice served as her gatekeeper.
Mark Childress, a writer, told AL.com he first met Alice when he was a child. He said she gave up her law practice after she turned 100 at a time when she was the oldest practicing lawyer in Alabama.
"She told me she modeled her career on that of her father, Mr. Amasa Coleman Lee, who was of course the model of Atticus Finch," he wrote on social media. "I don't think there's any reason to feel sad about the end of a life so richly and completely lived.
