To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was first published in the United States on a day like today in 1960, and The Grandma thinks that the best homage to this masterpiece and its author is to reread it again.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in 1960 and was instantly successful.
In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill a Mockingbird has become a classic of modern American literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize.
More information: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, her neighbours and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.
Despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality, the novel is renowned for its warmth and humour. Atticus Finch, the narrator's father, has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers. The historian Joseph Crespino explains, In the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its main character, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism.
As a Southern Gothic and Bildungsroman novel, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence.
Scholars have noted that Lee also addresses issues of class, courage, compassion, and gender roles in the Deep South. The book is widely taught in schools in the United States with lessons that emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice.
More information: Cliffs Notes
Despite its themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has been subject to campaigns for removal from public classrooms, often challenged for its use of racial epithets.
In 2006, British librarians ranked the book ahead of the Bible as one every adult should read before they die.
Reaction to the novel varied widely upon publication. Despite the number of copies sold and its widespread use in education, literary analysis of it is sparse. Author Mary McDonough Murphy, who collected individual impressions of To Kill a Mockingbird by several authors and public figures, calls the book an astonishing phenomenon.
It was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1962 by director Robert Mulligan, with a screenplay by Horton Foote. Since 1990, a play based on the novel has been performed annually in Harper Lee's hometown.
To Kill a Mockingbird was Lee's only published book until Go Set a Watchman, an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, was published on July 14, 2015. Lee continued to respond to her work's impact until her death in February 2016, although she had refused any personal publicity for herself or the novel since 1964.
More information: The Wall Street Journal
The strongest element of style noted by critics and reviewers is Lee's talent for narration, which in an early review in Time was called tactile brilliance. Writing a decade later, another scholar noted, Harper Lee has a remarkable gift of story-telling. Her art is visual, and with cinematographic fluidity and subtlety we see a scene melting into another scene without jolts of transition.
Lee combines the narrator's voice of a child observing her surroundings with a grown woman's reflecting on her childhood, using the ambiguity of this voice combined with the narrative technique of flashback to play intricately with perspectives.
This narrative method allows Lee to tell a delightfully deceptive story that mixes the simplicity of childhood observation with adult situations complicated by hidden motivations and unquestioned tradition.
Scholars have characterized To Kill a Mockingbird as both a Southern Gothic and a Bildungsroman. Despite the novel's immense popularity upon publication, it has not received the close critical attention paid to other modern American classics.
More information: The New York Times
I think we are a region of storytellers,
naturally, just from our tribal instincts.
We did not have the pleasures of the theater or the dance,
motion pictures when they came along.
We simply entertain each other by talking.
Harper Lee
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