Fifty Years ago Nelle Harper Lee, as she liked to be called, published To Kill a Mockingbird with Harper, winning herself the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her first and only book.  Unlike some people, I'm perfectly happy with her one off.  The fact that each reading provides the reader with new and subtler feelings about the novel's content, makes it almost as if she'd written a handful of books featuring the same little town in Alabama.  I read it again this weekend, allowing Lee's simple, beautiful prose carry me to another time and place and hold me there by the force of her intent and the tenderness of her love.  This reading featured a few of the lesser characters, who nonetheless had real lives and made genuine contributions to the richness and meaning of the book.  It's hard to catch Ms. Lee's depth in a single or even just a few readings.  Her publisher has a new book called Scout, Atticus, and Boo, a collection of essays by a broad swathe of readers, who talk about their experiences with To Kill a Mockingbird.  From Oprah to Mary Badham, who played Scout in the film, to Lee's older sister who, at 98, is still practicing law in Monroeville, Alabama.  Essays by people from the north and south, from many cultural backgrounds speak of the changes To Kill a Mockingbird wrought in their lives.  Richard Russo took a while getting to it, because it was required reading in his high school and he simply did not read books that were forced on him.  Andrew Young, poor guy, never read it at all, feeling he'd been through all the stuff she was talking about. 

Scout Atticus and Boo, edited by Mary McDonagh Murphy will get you up and reading one of America's great novels for the first, second, or tenth time.  I am smiling with my recent reading of both books and hope many of you who think you've read To Kill a Mockingbird to read it again to discover you've only skimmed it.
Paul@prairielights.com