Harper Lee laid to rest at private funeral

Lee’s family said in a statement that she will be laid to rest in a private ceremony.

She expects those numbers to spike with the news of Harper Lee’s death.

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

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. “Name one that really has had more of an impact on Americans than that book”.

‘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.

Her casket was taken by silver hearse to the adjacent cemetery where her father, A.C. Lee and sister, Alice Lee, are buried.

The southern Alabama town of Monroeville seems destined to always be linked to Nelle Harper Lee.

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.

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 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. One Missoula book shop worker says the iconic author will be missed.

“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.

“We obeyed her wishes”, said Jackie Stovall, Lee’s second cousin.

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.

Lee had studied law at the University of Alabama but, six months before finishing her studies, she went to NY in the early 1950s to pursue a literary career while working as an airline reservation clerk.

“Oh no. The great Harper Lee has passed away, ‘ actress Debra Messing said on Twitter”.

“She was still the most brilliant person in any room”, Randall said.

“This is beyond the borders of Monroe County and Monroeville itself”, Anton said of Lee’s death.

Though, in Lee’s passing, she left behind a question about her book that might never be answered. “Not the one who’s surrounded by all these wonderful people in Monroeville who are supportive of her, but the ones who have compromised themselves and contradicted themselves. That was a book about her dad”.

In 1956 friends Michael and Joy Brown gave Lee a special Christmas gift, a year of financial support so she could work full time on To Kill a Mockingbird. “She was quoting Thomas More and setting me straight on Tudor history”.