Harper Lee laid to rest at private funeral in Alabama hometown

Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has been buried in a private funeral in her hometown in the USA state of Alabama.

“I wish that you folks could find an Alabama attorney who would not say that he or she was inspired to enter the practice of law because of having read To Kill a Mockingbird”, said Dr. Cathy Randall, a long-time friend of Lee’s.

The eulogy was the speech Flynt wrote in 2006 entitled “Atticus inside ourselves”, as a tribute when Lee won the Birmingham Pledge Foundation Award for racial justice.

“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.

Lee also played a key role in researching another great American book by Truman Capote, her childhood friend and the inspiration for the frail, precocious Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Actor Gregory Peck and novelist Harper Lee on the movie set of the film To Kill A Mockingbird in 1962.

“For her to so to speak call out her society for its injustices that was a monumental achievement”, she said.

The acclaimed author, who after her death drew praise on Friday from a wide range of public figures, including Oprah Winfrey and former President George W. Bush, was laid to rest at her family burial plot, alongside her father, mother and one sister, Alice, Carter said.

Brynn Anderson/AP Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” has become one of the best-selling and most remembered American novels.

James McBride, victor of the National Book Award in 2013 for the novel “Good Lord Bird” and author of the upcoming nonfiction “Kill ’em and Leave” about James Brown, said reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” as a child made him want to become a writer and that it “crystallized” for him an awareness of racism that had been “floating around him”.

“I join Alabamians and all Americans in mourning the passing of Harper Lee”, Mr Shelby said in a statement.

Flynt and Randall said they had recently visited Lee at the Monroeville assisted living facility where she had lived for several years because of declining health. “She was quoting Thomas More and setting me straight on Tudor history”.

Go Set a Watchman is a more complex book than Mockingbird, and perhaps far more reflective of the world around us.

The second, “Go Set a Watchman”, was released a year ago and is considered a prequel to Mockingbird.

Brynn Anderson/AP Monroeville, Ala., residents say that the town will forever be linked to late author Harper Lee. ‘Not one thing more, and not one thing less’.

In the novel, Finch takes an unpopular stance in a fictional 1930s Alabama community.

“Rest in peace, Harper Lee”, he posted. “That was a book about her dad”.