Harper Lee buried after special eulogy requested by "Mockingbird" author

Little Green Cars - Harper Lee

MONROEVILLE, Ala. On a day when mockingbirds sang outside the courthouse that inspired her classic American novel, author Harper Lee was laid to rest Saturday in a private ceremony, a reflection of how she had lived.

A few dozen people who comprised Lee"s intimate circle gathered at a church in the small Alabama town of Monroeville, which the author used as a model for the imaginary town of Maycomb, the setting of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "To Kill a Mockingbird." Lee died Friday at age 89.

Lee"s longtime friend, history professor Wayne Flynt, eulogized her in a ceremony at First United Methodist Church. 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. A spray of red and white roses covered the family headstone at the cemetery

Flynt said he delivered a eulogy that Lee specifically requested years ago. Entitled "Atticus Inside Ourselves," it was a tribute Flynt gave in 2006 when she won the Birmingham Pledge Foundation Award for racial justice. Flynt said Lee liked the speech so much that she wanted him to give it as her eulogy.

"I want you to say exactly that," Flynt quoted Lee as saying at the time. "Not one thing more, and not one thing less."

"If I deviated one degree, I would hear this great booming voice from heaven, and it wouldn"t be G*d," Flynt said in an earlier interview.

Details of the service were fiercely guarded. The author, who for decades had declined media interviews, had wanted a quick and quiet funeral without pomp or fanfare, family members said.

"We obeyed her wishes," said Jackie Stovall, Lee"s second cousin.

The town was appropriately somber a day after their native daughter"s death. Black bows adorned the doors of the old courthouse in Monroeville where Lee as a child, like her literary creation Scout Finch, would peer down from the balcony as her lawyer father tried his cases in the courtroom.

Mockingbirds chirped and frolicked among blooming camellia bushes outside the courthouse on a warm Alabama morning that teased the early arrival of spring.

Jared Anton, of Hollywood, Florida, sat outside the old courthouse during part of a planned vacation through the South that coincided with Lee"s death.

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

"It had an impact on me when I was younger. I wanted to do the right thing, to stand up to people, to defend the innocent, if you will," Anton said. "It is the greatest American novel. Name one that really has had more of an impact on Americans than that book."

Handwritten rejection letter from Harper Lee speaks volumes

The Southern town was home to childhood friends Truman Capote and Lee, giving rise to its self-given nickname of the literary capital of the South. Ann Mote, owner of the Ol" Curiosities & Book Shoppe in Monroeville, said she thinks the town will always be linked to Lee.

"She"s a part of it and always will be," Mote said.

Tributes to Lee"s novel dot the town. The courthouse is a museum that pays homage to her creation. There"s the Mockingbird Inn on the edge of town and a statute of children reading "Mockingbird" in the courthouse square. Tickets go on sale in a week for the city"s annual "To Kill A Mockingbird" play, Mote said. A black mourning bow donned the top of the sign at the bookstore, where a stack of hardcopy "Mockingbird" books sat the counter along with a DVD of the movie.

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.

"She was an Alabama treasure. She was an international treasure. 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.

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. Flynt said Lee was "savagely witty."

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

Source: http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/02/harper_lee_buried_after_specia.html

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New Harper Lee novel makes Atticus Finch a racist?

NEW YORK --

Harper Lee"s unexpected new novel offers an unexpected and startling take on an American literary saint, Atticus Finch.

"Go Set a Watchman" is set in the 1950s, 20 years after Lee"s celebrated "To Kill a Mockingbird," and finds Atticus hostile to the growing civil rights movement. In one particularly dramatic encounter with his now-adult daughter, Scout, the upright Alabama lawyer who famously defended a black man in "Mockingbird" condemns the NAACP as opportunists and troublemakers and labels blacks as too "backward" to "share fully in the responsibilities of citizenship."

"Would you want your state governments run by people who don"t know how to run "em"? argues the man portrayed by Oscar-winner Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation of "Mockingbird."

"They"ve made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways, but they"re far from it yet."

"Watchman" was written before "Mockingbird" and is only Lee"s second book, one that Lee"s attorney, Tonja Carter, has said she stumbled upon last year. It will be published Tuesday. The Associated Press purchased an early copy.

Publisher HarperCollins, anticipating concerns that Atticus" harsh talk will disillusion millions of fans, issued a statement late Friday saying, "The question of Atticus"s racism is one of the most important and critical elements in this novel, and it should be considered in the context of the book"s broader moral themes."

""Go Set a Watchman" explores racism and changing attitudes in the South during the 1950s in a bold and unflinching way," the statement reads. "At its heart, it is the coming-of-age story of a young woman who struggles to reconcile the saintly figure of her beloved father with her own more enlightened views. In "Go Set a Watchman," Scout takes center stage as we witness her anger toward and stand against prejudice and social injustice."

Rarely has news of a novel been so celebrated and so dreaded since HarperCollins shocked the world in February by announcing that a second Harper Lee novel was coming, an event her fans had long given up on and Lee had often said wouldn"t happen.

HarperCollins has reported that pre-orders for "Watchman" are the highest in company history, and Amazon.com has announced that the novel"s pre-orders are the strongest since the last "Harry Potter" story, which came out in 2007.

But questions have been raised all along about the quality of the book, completed when Lee was a young and unpublished writer and received coolly by publishers, and whether the 89-year-old Lee was fully aware of the planned release.

Alabama officials, responding to at least one complaint of possible elder abuse, even visited with Lee at her nursing home in Monroeville and concluded she was indeed capable of making decisions about the book.

The portrait of Atticus, a supposed liberal revealing crude prejudices, will likely re-energize an old debate about "Mockingbird," which has long been admired more by whites than by blacks. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, and widely praised as a sensitive portrait of racial tension as seen through the eyes of a child in 1930s Alabama, it also has been criticized as sentimental and paternalistic.

In an interview with The Associated Press earlier this year, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison called it a "white savior" narrative, "one of those" that reduced blacks to onlookers in their own struggles for equal rights.

(Copyright 2015 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Source: http://abc7.com/news/new-harper-lee-novel-makes-atticus-finch-a-racist/842032/

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Harper Lee dismissing claims she's been steamrollered into releasing new book

• Publisher claims Harper Lee 'said she is happy as h**l' about new book
• Sequel to her only novel To Kill A Mockingbird will be released this year
• Biographer insists Lee's sister and long-time lawyer, who died recently, would not have allowed the project to go ahead
• Friend of the family says Lee is 'blind' and 'would sign anything'
• Go Set A Watchman was written before Lee penned her masterpiece

ByMia De Graaf For Dailymail.comand Press Association

Published: 05:59 EST, 5 February 2015 | Updated: 10:34 EST, 5 February 2015

The publisher's of Harper Lee's sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird have released a statement from the Putlizer Prize-winning novelist slamming claims she has been coerced into the project.

According to the release, Lee says she is 'happy as h**l' about the publication of Go Set A Watchman, which she wrote before penning her masterpiece.

The statement comes amid speculation the reclusive 88-year-old was coerced into the project after suffering a stroke in 2007 which reportedly left her blind.

Lee previously said she had not realized the manuscript of her new book had survived and that she was 'humbled and amazed' it was going to be published now.

'I'm happy as h**l': Harper Lee's publisher has released a statement slamming claims she has been coerced into publishing Go Set A Watchman, the sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird, 60 years after it was written

But critics including her biographer and a friend of the Lee family have spoken out against the release, claiming she is in no fit state to sign publication papers.

Charles J Shields, author of Mockingbird: Portrait Of Harper Lee, said the project would have been blocked if Alice Lee, the novelist's older sister and lawyer, had not died.

'Understanding the relationship between the sisters as I do, I doubt whether Alice would have allowed this project to go forward,' Shields told the International Business Times.

He said Alice, who died in November 2014 at the age of 103, was 'Harper Lee's buffer against the publicity hungry world.'

'It's because her sister is dead,' he explained. 'Alice was in control of Harper's life, of what she signed. But now the lid's off, and a book written half a century ago is going to be published.'

Unaware? Harper Lee, pictured with Gregory Peck, who starred in the movie version of To Kill A Mockingbird, allegedly did not know the manuscript for her original version - Go Set A Watchman - survived 60 years

Adding to the outcry, Marja Mills, a friend of the Lee family and author of a Harper Lee memoir, told the New York Times: 'I have some concerns about statements that have been attributed to her.'

She said Alice Lee, told her that Harper 'can't see and can't hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence.'

Furthermore, publisher Jonathan Burnham acknowledged that the publisher has had no direct conversations about the new book with Harper Lee, but communicated through her Monroeville attorney, Tonja Carter, and literary agent Andrew Nurnburg.

Best-seller: After the publication of To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee did not publish again

However, slamming the allegations of coercion,a spokesman for the publishing house claims Lee said: 'I'm alive and kicking and happy as h**l with the reactions to Watchman.'

The novel, called Go Set A Watchman, was written before To Kill A Mockingbird but was rejected by publishers who set her to work on the novel that made her famous.

To Kill A Mockingbird, set around a rape trial in the racially-divided Deep South of the US, has sold more than 40 million copies since it was published in 1960.

Its central characters, Scout, her brother Jem and their lawyer father Atticus, were brought to life in a 1962 film starring Gregory Peck.

The new book revolves around the now-adult Scout's return to her native Alabama from New York to visit her father.

A spokesman for her publisher said: 'Harper Lee still enjoys reading and uses a magnifying machine from the New York Institute for the Blind to read books, newspapers and documents.'

Go Set A Watchman will be published on July 14 by William Heinemann, which was the original UK publisher of To Kill A Mockingbird.

The publisher says Carter came upon the manuscript at a 'secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Burnham said during a telephone interview that he had known both Carter and Nurnburg for years and was 'completely confident' Lee was fully involved in the decision to release the book.

'We've had a great deal of communication with Andrew and Tonja,' said Burnham, adding that Nurnburg had met with her recently and found her 'feisty and in very fine spirits.

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Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2940847/Lee-happy-Mockingbird-sequel.html

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