“To Kill a Mockingbird”: much loved, often challenged

Powerful writing has a way of removing our social blinders. That’s why good books can also feel so dangerous to some people. Harper Lee’s sole and Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is considered to be one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. It is also one of the era’s most banned and challenged books. The story of Atticus Finch, who quietly stood up to racist laws and institutions in the deep South, has moved readers to revelations and to tears since it was first published in 1960.

“I tried to give a sense of proportion to life in the South,” said Lee in one of the few interviews she has given since the novel’s publication. “I think that Southerners react with the same kind of horror as other people do about the injustice in their land.” (You can find this interview and much more on To Kill a Mockingbird & Harper Lee, the comprehensive Web site of an admirer.)

It’s a testament to the power of Lee’s work and to the accuracy of the social mirror that she provides that To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most frequently challenged and sometimes banned books of the twentieth century. In school districts across the United States, parents and administrators have challenged the propriety of requiring students to read a work that includes profanity, racial slurs, rape, and racism. At times, the challenges have been successful. But, most often, the novel remains on library shelves and on class curricula as an important reflection of American life and history.

The first full-length biography of Harper Lee, by the way, was published in May, 2006. Biographer Charles J. Shields “has done an admirable job of getting to know Nelle Harper Lee from a distance,” writes Anita Beaman for The Hub. “Due to Lee’s desire for privacy, it’s as close as readers are likely to come to getting inside the mind of the author of one of the greatest books of the twentieth century.” Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee has already been nominated for a Quill Book Award.