Harper Lee’s 1960 novel is one of the landmark works of classic American literature, and it stands the test of time in school curricula and public discourse more than 60 years later - not to mention on stage.Īaron Sorkin’s play adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird premiered to acclaim on Broadway in 2018 and opened in the West End in 2022. She just tells us an eyes-wide-open story of a time in America that wasn’t all that long ago.If you went to middle or high school, you probably read To Kill a Mockingbird. Never does Lee tell us what the right thing is, or even the better thing that should happen. The brilliance of Lee’s story is its undeniable ability to expose the reader to a reality being faced by many of their fellow Americans.
One of the reasons given was that “it’s a very difficult book, and a lot of thorny subjects are raised, and we felt that some teachers may not feel comfortable guiding their students through it,” said John Gahagan, a member of the school board. The Mukilteo School District in Washington just removed Mockingbird from its required reading list in 2022. Lee wrote a fiction deeply steeped in the reality of the time.īut even today this novel is being banned anew. And of course, justice does not prevail in the end.
There is the “white savior” figure of Atticus Finch. There is racist language, including a prolific use of the N word. And this combination colluded to raise the ire of many groups of Americans. Mockingbird was, and is, a powerful story about poverty, racism, sexism and injustice. So how is it that this piece of Americana has been banned and continues to be banned? Harper Lee’s story is set in a time not really that long ago in America. 23, 2018, PBS host Meredeth Vieira shared with us what many already knew: that To Kill a Mockingbird was the most beloved novel in America.
0 kommentar(er)
