In Harper Lee's hometown, tributes and odes echo author's private life

Monroeville, Alabama is full of landmarks – and enterprises – inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird. On the day its author died, the small town carried on like before

Flowers are placed on a statue of a girl reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in Monroeville, Alabama. Photograph: Brynn Anderson/AP

Matthew Teague in Monroeville, Alabama

Saturday 20 February 2016 - The Guardian

The sorrow, like everything in this small Alabama town, is more complicated than it first appears.

Writer whose 1961 novel became a defining text of 20th-century literature and of racial troubles in the American south has died in Monroeville, AlabamaHarper Lee’s great book, To Kill a Mockingbird, was arguably the defining American novel of the 20th century. In a story accessible even to schoolchildren, she captured both the country’s original sin and its redeeming qualities.

The author lifted her hometown to global prominence, even as she personally pushed that prominence away. She was famous, and famously reclusive.
By the time she died on Friday morning, at 89, everyone in Monroeville, from those too young to read to those too old to see, knew of her. But almost no one really knew her.  More