Harper Lee, who died Friday at age 89, was eulogised at a church in the small Alabama town of Monroeville yesterday, which the author used as a model for the imaginary town of Maycomb, the setting of Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
A few dozen people who comprised Lee's intimate circle gathered at the First United Methodist Church to hear a eulogy yesterday by her longtime friend and history professor, Wayne Flynt. Afterward, her casket was taken by silver hearse to an adjacent cemetery where her father, AC Lee and sister, Alice Lee, are buried.
Flynt said Lee liked the speech so much that she wanted him to give it as her eulogy.
Details of the service were fiercely guarded. Lee had wanted a quick and quiet funeral without pomp or fanfare, family members said.
Lee was largely unseen in her hometown in recent years, as she first sought privacy and then was secluded at an assisted living home. Security guards would shoo away the inevitable mix of reporters, curious onlookers and old acquaintances who were not on her list of approved visitors.