Harper Lee

What does To Kill a Mockingbird gain from being narrated retrospectively? What qualities are lost in this type of narration?

How does Harper Lee develop the character of Boo Radley?

What principles of plot construction does Lee master most thoroughly in her novel?

Does the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird magnify the character of Atticus Finch beyond his status in the novel?

In addition to the novel that made her famous, Harper Lee wrote for magazines, including Vogue and McCall’s.

Based entirely on her first and only novel, Harper Lee’s success has been phenomenal. According to a survey of reading habits conducted in 1991 by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, researchers found that her novel To Kill a Mockingbird was “most often cited as making a difference in people’s lives, second only to the Bible.” In 1999, Lee’s novel was voted Best Novel of the Century in a poll conducted by Library Journal.

In 1961, To Kill a Mockingbird won a Pulitzer Prize in fiction, the Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the Alabama Library Association Award, and the British Book Society Award. By 1962 it had become a Literary Guild selection and a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, it had won the Bestsellers’ Magazine Paperback of the Year award, and it was featured in the Reader’s Digest series of condensed books. In the same year, Lee was given an honorary doctorate by Mount Holyoke College. She received another honorary doctorate, in 1990, from the University of Alabama, and another from the University of Notre Dame, in 2006. In 2007, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to American literature.

Initially enjoying seventy-three weeks on the national best-seller lists, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into at least ten languages. A motion-picture adaptation of the novel, starring Gregory Peck, was released in 1962 and won several Academy Awards. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Lee to the National Council on the Arts in 1966, on which she served for five years. In 1970, playwright Christopher Sergel published a stage version of the novel titled Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: A Full-Length Play, with Dramatic Publications. The play was professionally performed on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1980’s and 1990’s.