On the 50th anniversary of the famed book by Harper Lee, we consulted a National Endowment for the Arts 'Big Read' transcript of a radio show created in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services :
Dana Gioia: Today, we will visit Maycomb, Alabama, as we discuss the classic 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.
“How's that?”Anne Twomey reads from To Kill a Mockingbird…
“Scout,” said Atticus, “when summer comes you'll have to keep your head about far worse things [...] This case, Tom Robinson's case, is something that goes to the essence of the man’s conscience — Scout, I couldn't go to church and worship God if I didn't try to help that man.”
“Atticus, you must be wrong.…”
"Well, most folks seem to think they’re right and you're wrong.…”
“They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions. [...] but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
David Baker: It's about prejudice, it's about pride. There is that duality that all human beings have, that nobody's essentially all bad or all good and I thought that more than anything else, she was able to capture that.
Sandra Day O’Connor: The underlying theme is the sometimes treatment of blacks in the criminal justice system in the South.
Robert Duvall: There's about more than a slice of life in the South, about a family, and about a good father who is concerned about his family but he's also legitimately concerned about his community.
Curtis Sittenfeld: I would say that it's about a lot of things. I mean, obviously it's a lot about sort of issues of racial justice and injustice and it's about small town life. It's about this sort of growing consciousness of a child. And I think that's probably why it works, because it has different things to offer different people who read it.
Gioia: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is that rare American novel that can be discovered with excitement in adolescence and reread in adulthood with equal enthusiasm. The novel is Lee’s only published book, yet it has achieved staggering critical and popular success.
Harper Lee’s full name is Nelle Harper Lee. Nelle is the name of her grandmother, Ellen spelled backwards. Young Nelle grew up in a small town in Alabama, which she used as the model for Maycomb County in To Kill a Mockingbird. Charles J. Shields has written the first comprehensive biography of the author titled, Mockingbird, A Portrait of Harper Lee.
Charles J. Shields: She's from Monroeville, Alabama which is south of Montgomery about a hundred miles. It's landlocked area. There's no river there. When the railroad stopped running in the 1960s, Monroeville sort of drifted back into its rural past. It had a boom time when Nelle was growing up. When her father was making his career in the 30s, and the 40s, and the 50s, Monroeville was really doing well, but eventually it faded back into what it was in the reconstruction years almost in terms of it energy.
Elizabeth Spencer: I think if you put Carrollton, Mississippi — where I was brought up, a small town — and renamed it Maycomb, Alabama, nobody would even pause in the day, they'd just be like that.
Gioia: Novelist, Elizabeth Spencer.
Spencer: These small towns in the South, 70 years ago or even a little more, were pretty much the same. I used to think, you could just go in a Southern town with a video camera and a tape recorder and you'd have a novel after week.
Gioia: When Universal Studios decided to film To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee declined the offer to write the screenplay. Southern playwright Horton Foote took the job.
Horton Foote: I just felt it could have been set in my little town in Texas. We had a large black population. We had all the prejudices that the book exposes and, I think, a lot of the virtues which were Southern virtues that were this sense of place, this sense of really belonging to something and this essential conflict of being surrounded by a problem that we still haven't solved. And I felt very close to all the characters, and I thought she did a remarkable job of getting that kind of small town Southern feeling of that period in time.
Follow the rest of The Big Read transcript from the National Endowment For the Arts and the remaining events nationwide celebrating the 50th anniversary of the book's publication. Listen, too, to Sissy Spacek's audiobook recording of To Kill a Mockingbird. In addition, The Guardian of England has gathered "photographs of Lee as her debut novel first found celebrity, the town where the book was set, and the film that was made of it."
Finally, The Guardian has published a quiz testing your knowledge of the novel.
