Iconic author Harper Lee passed away Friday morning. She was 89 years old. Her most famous work, "To Kill a Mockingbird," remains one of the most memorable contributions to American letters.
This past summer, Memphis magazine spoke with Lee's childhood neighbor, a Memphis-transplant named John Turner who grew up in Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.
Writes Anne Cunningham O'Neill, "Nelle Harper Lee was born in 1926, the youngest of four children. Turner recalls that back then, Monroeville was idyllic. Tucked away in southwest Alabama, 90 miles northeast of Mobile, Monroeville is close enough to the Gulf that as kids, Turner says, 'we’d go to church and then go to the beach and back in a day.' It was a bustling and special place, a center of the textile and lumber industries, where everyone knew and cared about each other. The glue that bound the citizenry together in this Bible belt town was the Methodist church."
You can read the complete article here.
