Alabama hometown was refuge of privacy for author Harper Lee

“With her near-total retreat into private life in the mid-1960s, Ms. Lee had become, along with J.D”.

As we grew up, we learned that the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel published in 1960 had touched the hearts of people the world over, that they were passing it on to their children just as we were passing it on to ours.

Lee, who rose to fame with 1961’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and re-emerged a year ago with the publication of “Go Set a Watchman”, died peacefully in her home in Monroeville, Alabama, sources from the town and mayoral office said.

As a title, it struck me as a little too funny-the author’s name, however, left quite the impression: Harper Lee.

Inside the Atticus coffee shop there are several tributes to Lee, including early editions of the book, the “To Kill a Mockingbird” soundtrack and lines from the book posted in order, page by page, across one entire wall off the shop.

The flip side of the story has Lee playing a major role in the writing of Capote’s “In Cold Blood”, published in 1966. A previous manuscript that had originally been rejected by her publisher, Go Set A Watchman, was discovered and published in 2015. “You have to start the conversation about race somewhere, and Harper Lee is a great place to start it”.

Unlike many of her peers, Lee shied away from the camera and was a very private person, hardly giving interviews or making public appearances.

In a rare insight, the novelist admitted in 1964 she had been completely caught off guard by being catapulted into the nation’s consciousness by her novel.

In 1959, when the rewritten novel passed muster, Ms. Lee expressed her relief in a letter to Ms. Williams. Though that may be true, the few who got to experience her wit and candor remember her with adoring admiration. “I will always be grateful to have known Nelle in the last years of life as she had known it for so long, sharing their father’s house with her sister in the town that inspired ‘To Kill a Mockingbird‘”.

She actually wrote a related work, which is both a first draft of and a sequel to Mockingbird, called Go Set a Watchman, that mysteriously surfaced and soared in sales last spring.

According to Wanda Green, the museum’s executive director, the courtroom was replicated for the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, starring Gregory Peck.

To Kill A Mockingbird, bringing light to racism and the rigid class structures in the USA in the 1930s, remains highly studied in schools and universities – as such, thousands of people around the world have had some level of interaction with the book in their lifetimes. “I don’t know”, she said.