Harper Lee breaks her silence in letter to Oprah

Oprah Winfrey is known for endorsing the virtues of settling down with a good book, but now, in something of a literary coup, the chatshow host has recruited an ally even more powerful than herself.
Published in the summer issue of Oprah's magazine, O, a rare item by the veteran author of To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, tells of her discovery of books as a girl growing up in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town.
The 80-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner stopped giving interviews about 40 years ago and, other than a 1983 review of an Alabama history book, has published nothing of significance in some four decades.
Lee tells of becoming a reader before first grade: she was read to by her older sisters and brother, a story a day by her mother, newspaper articles by her father. 'Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggly at bedtime.'
She also writes about the scarcity of books in the 1930s in Monroeville, where she grew up and still lives for part of the year. That deficit, combined with a lack of anything else to do - no movies for kids, no parks for games - made books especially treasured, she writes.
'Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.'