While the white characters in this book are the subjects, who take action into their own hands, who suffer and make sacrifices, the Black characters in this book are objects. Comfort that they, especially back in the 1960s, didn't need, and allow me to be so bold, didn't deserve. This book gives comfort to the white middle class. This book is a pat on the back for the white middle class. This book was written by a white woman, from a white perspective, about white characters, for a white audience. I am aware that some of my criticism is not a critique of the book itself, but about its perception, and how it is, up to this day, held up as the one true book about race relations in the United States of America.Īnd that really infiruates me. Upon my re-read of this book, I honestly don't have good things to say. Sadly, I didn't write my thoughts down in an elaborate way back in the day, but I know for sure, that I didn't read critically then. When I first read this book three years ago, I really liked it. This is my first re-read of 2017, and I don't regret it one bit. / gentle reminder that this is not the time to read this book /// In 1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll by the Library Journal. It remains a bestseller with more than 30 million copies in print. Published July 11, 1960, the novel was an immediate bestseller and won great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. editor Tay Hohoff, she completed To Kill a Mockingbird in the summer of 1959. The following month at the East 50th townhouse of her friends Michael Brown and Joy Williams Brown, she received a gift of a year's wages with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Having written several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. She lived a frugal life, traveling between her cold-water-only apartment in New York to her family home in Alabama to care for her father. Lee continued as a reservation clerk until the late 50s, when she devoted herself to writing. Though she did not complete the law degree, she studied for a summer in Oxford, England, before moving to New York in 1950, where she worked as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC. While there, she wrote for several student publications and spent a year as editor of the campus humor magazine, "Ramma-Jamma". As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote.Īfter graduating from high school in Monroeville, Lee enrolled at the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery (1944-45), and then pursued a law degree at the University of Alabama (1945-50), pledging the Chi Omega sorority. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who served on the state legislature from 1926 to 1938. Harper Lee, known as Nelle, was born in the Alabama town of Monroeville, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee.
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