A Sin to Kill a Song Bird...

Harper Lee tells a gripping tale -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
The latest book in my "Boomer Lit" series is To Kill a Mockingbird. I thought I'd read this book in my distant teenage past, but I hadn't -- I only saw the 1962 movie with Gregory Peck starring as Atticus Finch.

The book has much finer detail, and more character sketching than could possibly be squeezed into a two hour movie. It's set in Maycomb, Alabama circa 1935, and the small-town Southern setting would surely resonate with my own parents. My mother grew up in Bellmead, Texas and my father grew up in towns such as Groom and Shamrock, Texas (also in the 1930's). The Texas towns' drawls, the attitudes and the racism were much the same as depicted in Mockingbird, though my parents never observed a sensational trial or a near-lynching.

Mockingbird came out in 1960, as the civil rights movement was heating up across America. The book earned a Pulitzer and was recently voted Best Novel of the 20th Century by the Librarians of America. At the time of its publication, it grabbed the attention of Hollywood and thus white Middle America -- it had an enormous influence on our collective racial attitudes and it advanced civil rights.

To Kill a Mockingbird tells the story of an 8-year old tom boy named Scout and her 12 year-old brother Jem. They are children to Atticus Finch, a widower who is the Public Defender at the local court house. Atticus is assigned to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman; the town of Maycomb is in a total scandalized buzz over the proceedings. I won't divulge what all happens, but the author, Harper Lee, tells the story with amazingly realistic imagery. Woven into the racial plot-line is the children's fascination with a local reclusive, shut-in named Boo Radley. Mockingbird adeptly focuses on issues of gossip, innuendo and labeling no matter whether the target is a poor black defendant or a cloistered, ill white person with no public identity.

Mockingbird is semi-autobiographical. Lee herself was the daughter of a prominent Alabama lawyer and witnessed race-related trials in her childhood. There is a bit of Harper Lee trivia to note. She never published another novel after this one. If only one novel was to be done, this was the one to do. She was childhood friends with Truman Capote and the character Dill (Scout's mischievous blond playmate) was inspired by Truman. There were murmurs that Capote was the ghost-writer of the book but all parties including Mr. Capote denied that. Also, the style of the book is similar to but not the same as Capote's style. Lee and Capote remained good friends through adulthood, and she even helped him with research for his opus, In Cold Blood.

Once in a blue moon, a book comes along that changes the world at least in part. Uncle Tom's Cabin and All Quiet on the Western Front come to mind. To Kill a Mockingbird is very much in that tradition.

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