Harper Lee's hometown looking to get a 'Mockingbird' tourism boost
Monroeville, Alabama, is home to famous To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee. It's also a place that hopes to become home to a bustling literary tourism scene.
Since Lee's death earlier this year the author's attorney and others have made moves to create the "Harper Lee Trail," AL.com learned.
In an article Thursday, the Birmingham News website laid out plans to encourage visits from Lee fanatics and fans of Scout and her dad Atticus Finch from iconic 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Those plans include refurbishing a historic building to become a Lee-dedicated museum and building life-size replicas of homes from her famous novel and its somewhat controversial 2015 sequel, Go Set a Watchman, released just months before the author's death at 89.
The small Alabama town already pulls in book lovers who visit its iconic courthouse that served as the inspiration for the setting in Mockingbird.
According to AL.com, 30,000 people already come each year to visit the site. With the new "trail," the city is hoping 250,000 will make the pilgrimage.
The plans are ambitious and costly so the trail likely won't materialize for several years, the paper reported.
For now a visit to the courthouse will have to suffice.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
