Alabama town forever linked to Lee and “Mockingbird”

Harper Lee, the elusive U.S. author who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book To Kill A Mockingbird, has died aged 89.

The funeral service was held at First United Methodist Church in Monroeville on Saturday, with history professor Wayne Flynt, a long-time friend, delivering the eulogy. She was to be buried at Pineville Cemetery near the church, next to her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, who was the role model for her fictional character Atticus Finch, and near the graves of her mother, Frances, and her sister Alice. “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.

Bush said during a statement that he and his wife, Laura Bush, a former librarian, mourned Lee. She would have a private funeral but no date was announced.

“When I saw her just six weeks ago, she was full of life, her mind and mischievous wit as sharp as ever”, her agent, Andrew Nurnberg, said in a statement. Before her stroke in 2007, she made public appearances that advocated for education or civil rights, but they received little fanfare.

Its unflinching examination of racial hatred in the South centred on lawyer Atticus Finch, the adored father of the young narrator Scout, who stood up to a white lynch mob and unsuccessfully defended a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman.

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.

A family friend, the Reverend Thomas Lane Butts, told an Australian interviewer that Lee had said she did not publish again because she did not want to endure the pressure and publicity of another book and because she had said all that she wanted to say. Lee also faithfully attended an annual lunch at the University of Alabama for the winners of a high-school essay contest for many years, always making time to meet fans and sign books for students.

“There is no question in my mind that Harper Lee is a great American writer with the best of intentions”. The courthouse is now a museum that pays homage to her creation. Gregory Peck portrayed the Alabama lawyer in the 1962 movie version of the novel. There’s the Mockingbird Inn on the edge of town and a statute of children reading, “Mockingbird” in the courthouse square.

Lee was largely unseen in her hometown in recent years, as she first sought privacy and then was secluded at an assisted living home.

It’s common knowledge in Monroeville that Lee did not like to talk about “Mockingbird“. “She changed the world with To Kill A Mockingbird”.

“That’s just speculation here”, Green said.