Harper Lee hated Trump's Taj Mahal resort, letter reveals

Harper Lee, one of America's most celebrated novelists who died in February, thought Donald Trump's infamous Taj Mahal casino was hell on Earth, a stash of her private correspondence revealed March 29.
 
The "To Kill a Mockingbird" author, whose masterpiece about racial injustice was read by millions, slammed the billionaire presidential hopeful's boardwalk resort in New Jersey in a letter to a friend in 1990.
 
"The worst punishment God can devise for this sinner is to make her spirit reside eternally at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City," Lee wrote in the missive, recovered along with several others from her New York apartment.
 
Lee, who was apparently entertaining visitors, stayed at the $1 billion gambling spot a few months after its April 1990 inauguration.    

The resort is now owned by billionaire Carl Icahn, who took over in February after Trump Entertainment Resorts came out of bankruptcy, though it still bears the Republican frontrunner's name.
 
The note, written to her friend Doris Leapard in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is one of 29 going under the hammer at the Nate D. Sanders auction house Los Angeles on March 39, and had already attracted an online bid of $1,209 shortly after being offered online.    

Most of the letters are typed correspondence between Lee and Leapard, and Leapard's husband, Bill, and all have a starting price of $750.
 
In another letter to Leapard, dated January 29, 1999, Lee thanks her friend for getting her the autograph of Vivian Malone Jones, who in 1965 became the first black graduate from the University of Alabama.
 
"I shall treasure (the autograph) always. Looking back, it's incredible what people had to endure just for their basic rights," she wrote...