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  Newsmakers   Harper Lee’s friend to write book on her life

Harper Lee’s friend to write book on her life

AP
Published : Mar 7, 2016, 6:45 am IST
Updated : Mar 7, 2016, 6:45 am IST

A longtime friend of Harper Lee says he is writing a book on the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author who wrote the American classic To Kill a Mockingbird.

Harper Lee
 Harper Lee

A longtime friend of Harper Lee says he is writing a book on the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author who wrote the American classic To Kill a Mockingbird.

Wayne Flynt said on Saturday that he expects the book, a mix of memoir and biography, to be finished by the end of the year. Lee died in February at the age of 89. Flynt, who is a history professor, says he’s known Lee for about 35 years.

Flynt eulogised Lee in a ceremony at the First United Methodist Church on February 21. At the time, Flynt said he delivered a eulogy that Lee specifically requested years ago. The eulogy was a tribute Flynt gave in 2006 when Lee won the Birmingham Pledge Foundation Award for racial justice. “She said, ‘Hang on to this speech, and do this as my memorial,’” Flynt recalled. “‘I’ll have someone else read it if you die first.’”

So, Lee had heard her funeral sermon more than five years before she died. “There were some things that just had to be changed, a few words,” Flynt said.

After the funeral, a hearse picked up her casket and took it to the graveside of her father, A.C. Lee, the model for the fictional Atticus Finch, and her oldest sister, Alice Lee, in the cemetery next to the church. “She’s buried right beside them; they were the two most important people in her life, along with (middle sister) Louise (Conner) and (older brother) Ed,” Flynt told al.com, a local Alabama website that covers news and happenings in the southern US state.

“The two transcendent figures in her life were her father and sister Alice.”

For years, Lee had lived in an apartment in New York City and travelled by train to visit Alice in Monroeville for part of the year, before moving back to Alabama permanently the last few years of her life. “She was legendarily private. I’ve never known such a private woman in my life. It’s no surprise that she left Monroeville, a gossipy little southern town where everybody wants to know everybody’s business, and went to the most anonymous city in America.”

Flynt said Lee would have preferred to die in New York. “She said, ‘If I die in New York, I want to be cremated and have my ashes scattered around the four corners of Manhattan. I hope I die in New York City,’” he said. “‘If I die in Monroeville, I want you to do this eulogy and I don’t want any other preachers there.’”

“She loved New York City. She gloried in being able to go to Broadway and people not recognise her, eating out and not having people come up to the table to remind her that their grandmother had been in school with her (laughter). She felt this world down here was a claustrophobic world,” said Flynt.

Flynt is an ordained Baptist minister, a point which Lee always made fun of. “She said, ‘You’re too smart to be a Baptist.’”

For Alabama, it meant a lot that the state’s most famous author died where she was born, Flynt said.

Location: United States, Georgia, Atlanta