Author Harper Lee buried in Alabama hometown

Last night, as a tribute to the woman they called “Nelle”, a group of family and friends of Harper Lee gathered at a Monroeville restaurant to reminisce.

United States political and cultural figures yesterday mourned the death of author Harper Lee, one of the country’s most celebrated novelists, who died on Friday at age 89 in her home town of Monroeville, Alabama. Lee, the elusive author of best-seller “To Kill a Mockingbird”, died Friday, Feb. 19, according to her publisher Harper Collins.

Brynn Anderson/AP Monroeville, Ala., residents say that the town will forever be linked to late author Harper Lee.

Mr Flynt said he had not asked Lee about “The Reverend”. “Not one thing more, and not one thing less”. Afterward, her casket was taken by silver hearse to an adjacent cemetery where her parents, A.C. Lee and Frances Finch Lee, and sister, Alice Lee, are buried.

Jared Anton, of Hollywood, Florida, sat outside the old courthouse Saturday during part of a planned vacation through the South that coincided with Lee’s death. Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird “prodded America to catch up with her”, Mr Bush said yesterday.

Anton said reading the book – in which attorney Atticus Finch defends a wrongly accused African-American man – was one of the reasons he chose to become a lawyer.

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”.

In Dr. Dagny Bloland’s 8th grade English class at Whitney Young, Harper Lee is alive and well.

In 2001 Mockingbird was selected for Chicago’s One Book, One Chicago citywide read. Gregory Peck portrayed the Alabama lawyer in the 1962 movie version of the novel. “To Kill a Mockingbird”, a novel about race and justice in the South, earned her immediate worldwide acclaim when it was published in 1960. Flynt said Lee was “savagely witty”. “I believe she wasn’t strong enough at the end of her life to make any informed decisions about her work”, he said. “We will miss her dearly”.

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”. “She lived her life the way she wanted to – in private – surrounded by books and the people who loved her”, Michael Morrison, head of HarperCollins U.S. general books group, said in the statement.

“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.