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 Harper Lee, the 87-year-old author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” sued her literary agent, claiming he took advantage of her age and infirmity to deprive her of royalties from the novel. Lee, of Monroeville, Alabama, sued Samuel Pinkus, the agent, and others seeking to ensure her ownership of the copyright to the 1960 novel and to compel forfeiture of the agent’s commissions, according to a complaint filed yesterday in federal court in New York. Posner didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail sent to his website yesterday seeking comment on the lawsuit. The lawsuit alleges the son-in-law, Samuel Pinkus, failed to properly protect the copyright of the book after his father-in-law, Eugene Winick _ who had represented Lee as a literary agent since the book was published in 1960 through the firm McIntosh and Otis _ became ill a decade ago. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a story of racial injustice in the American South, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was made into a film starring Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar for playing the lawyer Atticus Finch.
– Atticus! Harper Lee has sued her former literary agent, claiming that he tricked her into signing over the rights and royalties of To Kill a Mockingbird, reports Reuters. The 87-year-old author alleges that Samuel Pinkus, the son-in-law of her late longtime agent, pulled a fast one on her while she was recovering from a stroke in 2007. “Pinkus knew that Harper Lee was an elderly woman with physical infirmities that made it difficult for her to read and see,” says the complaint filed in federal court yesterday. “Harper Lee had no idea she had assigned her copyright." The story gets a little convoluted from there. The AP says Lee is suing to "re-secure" the copyright to the 1960 novel, but Bloomberg reports that she actually got the copyright back last year in a separate legal action. It adds, however, that Pinkus was still receiving royalties through the legal arrangement he set up in 2007. The new suit demands that he forfeit all of his Mockingbird commissions since the deal. Pinkus himself has not responded publicly.