Missoula book store reflects on Harper Lee’s career

Harper Lee died Friday morning, and was laid to rest in a private ceremony Saturday. And Alabama Governor Robert Bentley said “it is because of Harper Lee that the world knows about her special home town of Monroeville”.

“I think the retrospective will be more useful than what was said during her lifetime, because there are a lot of things we can get down to that were impossible before”, Lee’s friend Wayne Flynt, an Alabama-based historian, told The Associated Press. “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience”.

‘If I deviated one degree, I would hear this great booming voice from heaven, and it wouldn’t be God, ‘ Flynt said in an earlier interview.

The courthouse was where Lee as a child, like her creation Scout Finch, would peer down from the balcony as her father tried his cases in the courtroom.

The town was appropriately sombre a day after their native daughter’s death.

In the first book, Finch, the adored father of the young narrator Scout, stood up to a white lynch mob and unsuccessfully defended a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman. Or when he explains to her why it’s important to do the right thing by defending Tom Robinson: “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand….” The novel was adapted into a Hollywood film which won three Oscars in 1963, including the best actor award for Gregory Peck for his portrayal of Finch, one of the best-loved characters in American fiction.

Lee’s 1960 book To Kill a Mockingbird about racism and injustice in the U.S. South is a classic of American literature.

The town this summer had a celebration for the release of “Go Set a Watchman” – Lee’s initial draft of the story that would become “Mockingbird” – even though many residents had ambivalent feelings about its release.

But it is Atticus who shocks her and To Kill a Mockingbird fans.

“She was an Alabama treasure. We were all blessed by her life and her work as we are diminished by her passing”, said Cathy Randall, a friend of Lee’s for the past 30 years.

A billboard in Monroeville welcomes visitors and thanks the late novelist. Bush said during a statement that he and his wife, Laura Bush, a former librarian, mourned Lee.

Much like most of her life, the funeral was a very private event.

It’s common knowledge in Monroeville that Lee did not like to talk about “Mockingbird“.

Tickets for the city’s annual “Mockingbird” play go on sale in a week for the city’s annual “To Kill A Mockingbird” play, Mote said.

“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”, she wrote.

“That story, I’m glad it’s in just about all the schools now because it’s a story that everybody needs to hear”, he said.