Birmingham, Ala. • A batch of letters hand written by "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee has sold for more than $12,000.

A statement from the Los Angeles-based Nate D. Sanders Auctions says 38 letters from the deceased novelist to friend Felic Itzkoff went for $12,500 in a sale held Thursday night.

The letters span the period from December 2005 to May 2010 and include a note written on Jan. 20, 2009, the day Barack Obama was inaugurated as the nation's first black president.

The auction company says other letters talked about Lee's Southern heritage; her father; and Christianity and her apparent atheism.

Lee died in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in February 2016 about seven months after publishing "Go Set a Watchman," a companion book to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.