You can call her a one-hit literary wonder as if it’s a critique, but let’s face it: when To Kill a Mockingbird is your one “hit,” one is puh.len.tee.

Nelle Harrper Lee, who celebrated 88 years of AWESOME yesterday, never wrote another novel, but she’s done some pretty cool stuff since TKAM was published 54 years ago.

In 1966, upon learning Virginia’s Hanover County School Board voted to remove her “immoral” book from all of its library shelves, Lee penned a particularly passionate letter to board members. In the missive, she questions the board members’ literacy, compares them to Orwellian dictators, and encloses “a small contribution … that I hope will be used to enroll the Board in any first grade of its choice.”

In 2006, Lee wrote an open letter for O magazine about her deep and abiding love for libraries and books: “Oprah, can you imaging curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up – some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.”

And, in 2007, Lee made a rare public appearance to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush, alongside fellow recipients geneticist Francis Collins and former House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Henry Hyde.

Incidentally, Lee absolutely approved of Horton Foote’s 1962 Academy-Award-winning screenplay adaptation of TKAM, calling it “one of the best translations of a book to film ever made.” She also became a good friend of the Oscar-winning onscreen Atticus Finch, Gregory Peck, and remains close to his family; his grandson, Harper Peck Voll, is named for her.