MONROEVILLE, Ala. — On a day when mockingbirds sang outside the courthouse that inspired her classic American novel, author Harper Lee was laid to rest in a private ceremony, a reflection of how she had lived.

A few dozen people who comprised Lee’s intimate circle gathered Saturday at a church in the small Alabama town of Monroeville, which the author used as a model for the imaginary town of Maycomb, the setting of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Lee died Friday at age 89.

Lee’s longtime friend, history professor Wayne Flynt, eulogized her in a ceremony at First United Methodist Church. Afterward, her casket was taken by silver hearse to an adjacent cemetery where her parents, A.C. Lee and Frances Finch Lee, and sister, Alice Lee, are buried. A spray of red and white roses covered the family headstone at the cemetery

Flynt said he delivered a eulogy that Lee specifically requested years ago. Titled “Atticus Inside Ourselves,” it was a tribute Flynt gave in 2006 when she won the Birmingham Pledge Foundation Award for racial justice. Flynt said Lee liked the speech so much that she wanted him to give it as her eulogy.

“I want you to say exactly that,” Flynt quoted Lee as saying at the time. “Not one thing more, and not one thing less.”