For most of her life, Lee divided her time between New York City, where she wrote the novel in the 1950s, and her hometown of Monroeville, which inspired the book’s fictional Maycomb. Her librarian handler at university events called her “just a very regular woman” and said talking with her was “like spending time with an aunt”.
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Rob Carr/AP Harper Lee was eulogized by her longtime friend, Wayne Flint, who gave a speech she requested he read at her funeral.
It was a 2006 speech, entitled, ‘Atticus inside ourselves, ‘ that he gave as a tribute when Lee won the Birmingham Pledge Foundation Award for racial justice.
Mr Flynt said he had not asked Lee about “The Reverend”.
‘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.
And Alabama Governor Robert Bentley said “it is because of Harper Lee that the world knows about her special home town of Monroeville”. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, “Lee had a way of telling stories that does have an influence and resonates with so many Americans”.
McKenzie said the best way fans can honor the author’s memory is by applying the values in Mockingbird to the way they treat others.
However, Lee, for years was largely unseen in her hometown, as she first sought privacy and then was secluded at an assisted living home.
Go Set a Watchman, though jumpy and disjointed in parts, is fascinating because it shows us the way to Mockingbird, and we will, of course, never know how and why the portrayal of Atticus was softened. The book earned her a Pulitzer Prize and became a movie in 1962, with Gregory Peck in the starring role of Atticus Finch.
In an email to The Associated Press, award-winning historian Isabel Wilkerson said that Lee had created two equally worthy legacies.
Though, in Lee’s passing, she left behind a question about her book that might never be answered.
Friends and family of author Harper Lee leave the First United Methodist Church after a private funeral service, Saturday, Feb. 20, 2016, in Monroeville, Ala.
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“Her dad was a really good lawyer”, Brock said. When the Library of Congress did a survey in 1991 on books that have affected people’s lives, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was second only to the Bible. “The impact from now forward I think for the next few weeks we’ll have an influx of people in here just looking around and at some point like when anybody passes away at some point it just returns back to normal”, said Tim McKenzie, chairman of the museum’s board of directors who also acts in the play.
