I think there are certain books in which the characters are so real and so vivid that you feel as though they’ve become close personal friends. And that goes a long way to explaining why books last.
That’s the reason why A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which in many ways could feel quite antiquated, still sells every year, because Francie is somebody that readers feel as though they know, and so they revisit her over and over again.
I think there is no question that that’s true of this book. It is also a tremendous teaching tool. If I were teaching eighth graders and I wanted to talk about prejudice and doing the right thing and doing the hard thing and what it means to be female and what it means to be a citizen, this is on the top three or four. So it keeps coming around again in that way. And I think there are also books that give you a feeling about your possible best self, and this is one of those books. A Wrinkle in Time is one of those books. Little Women is one of those books, and this is definitely one of those books. That sense of being part of something that calls upon the best that people can be—that’s really exciting and satisfying, and that gets you in the gut.
People tend to dismiss books in which the centerpieces are children or young adults. I think it is very easy to slot this into the Young Adult category like some of the other books that I’ve mentioned. I just think that’s stupid. You can call The Catcher in the Rye a young-adult novel all you want, but it’s still going to speak to this new generation of readers.
The difference between The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird is, The Catcher in the Rye usually doesn’t survive adulthood. I’ve known some people who’ve gone back and read it and thought, This was my favorite book when I was sixteen. What was I thinking? I don’t know anybody who feels that way about To Kill a Mockingbird. You come back to it and you are still just sucked right into it. You know, you are sucked into it in a completely different way as an adult than you were as a kid because you understand what Atticus is facing as what was not then called the single parent. You are sucked right back in it. By the way, in his own times, Dickens’s work was denigrated all the time because it was popular. I love the literary tradition that suggests that if something is popular, it can’t really be first-rate. Give me a break.
I know a fair amount about Harper Lee. Every year or two, when I was a young reporter, I used to put in a formal request to interview Harper Lee. As a writer, there were a couple of things that obsessed me about her. There are lots of writers who have one great book in them; most of them write seven or eight. I was drawn to the notion of a woman who wrote one great book and then packed it in, for whatever reason. There are different theories about why she did so, but I loved that idea. The second thing was that as someone who has been on both sides of the yawning maw of the publicity machine, who has both interviewed countless authors and been interviewed many, many times, I love the fact that she wouldn’t play. Every time I got turned down for an interview, there was part of me that thought, Oh yeah! I gathered that HarperCollins had a very polite nice boilerplate letter that they sent to hundreds or thousands of us over the years, and I got it a couple of times.
Look—a million times, I’ve been asked with each of my books, “Are you going to write a sequel to Black and Blue? Are you going to write a sequel to Blessings?” Can you imagine the pressure on Harper Lee to write a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird once the movie came out and you could see that it kept selling every year? They just must have thrown rose petals and chocolates and millions of dollars at her feet, and I don’t know whether she couldn’t do it, but I prefer to think she wouldn’t do it because, of course, it’s utterly wrong.
Richard Russo
Richard Russo was born in Johnstown, New York, in 1949. He is the author of seven novels, including Mohawk (1986); Nobody’s Fool (1993); Empire Falls (2002), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; and That Old Cape Magic (2009). He is a screenwriter and retired professor.
The first time I read To Kill a Mockingbird, I don’t think I finished it, and the reason I didn’t finish it was that at the time I would have been in high school. And at that time, I had what was a hard-and-fast rule, which was to read everything I could get my hands on except what was assigned to me. It was Catholic school, and I was in that rebellious frame of mind that if somebody else wanted me to read it, it was probably crap.
So I went into To Kill a Mockingbird with that notion that it was like the other books that the nuns wanted me to read. So I remember reading and reluctantly thinking, This is really good, but I couldn’t admit to it. I couldn’t admit it to them; I couldn’t admit it to myself.
There was that father/daughter relationship, which burrowed under my skin even then. Those of us who become writers are becoming writers long before we ever put pen to paper. In Great Expectations, which I didn’t finish either, because it too had been assigned, there was something about the opening scenes of that book where Pip and Magwitch come together. There was something that burrowed into me there—a way in which you can be ashamed of someone you love, the way Joe Gargery is. That relationship between Joe Gargery and Pip really burrowed underneath, because I had a father who was largely absent, and when he came back, it was a small town and everybody wanted to know why my father didn’t live with us. So there was something about the opening of Great Expectations that burrowed very, very deep.
To Kill a Mockingbird was that way, even though I didn’t finish the book, even though I was stubbornly a teenager. In some way it probably frightened me, something about that book frightened me. I look back on it now in the way in which you are becoming a writer and certain books influence you. It’s hard to imagine Empire Falls being written without To Kill a Mockingbird, because I don’t think Tick could have existed without Scout—something about that father/daughter relationship. When I came back to it as an adult, a lot of the way I felt about my daughters and the way in which they were going about in the world, the way Scout does, is there.
Scout loves her father, but the truth is, young people are to a certain extent on their own, and they’re learning about life through their own eyes and own experiences.
And in the best father/daughter relationship there are going to be huge areas of their lives that you don’t have access to, you’re not privy to; you weren’t there. And a lot of people always ask me, “Why did you give that beautiful child in your novel the name of an ugly bug?” I always tell them, “I wanted a name as memorable for this character in my book as Scout is memorable in To Kill a Mockingbird.”
I went back and read it and, of course, recognized it for the masterpiece that it was. And it aided me in writing all of my father/daughter stuff, all my family stuff, because that is a quintessential American family, even though it’s not typical.
Atticus Finch, in some ways, was the father maybe that I longed for. But when I became a father, I found it very difficult to be that kind of father. I have found it impossible not to tell my daughters how much I love them at every juncture. Atticus is reserved. He trusts his daughter. He trusts his daughter to understand what is essential about him and about herself and about their relationship. I could never have gone about it that way, and yet there was some part of me that knew as a father that less would have been more. I think Atticus knew that and was able to act upon it as a principle. That great ability to trust a child and that great ability to understand that a child will know in the fullness of time what it is that you’re trying to get across. And that what you do, even more than what you say, will be all that that child ultimately will need. I didn’t have that great faith he seems to have in that book.
Back when I was teaching, I used to remind my students that masterpieces are masterpieces not because they are flawless but because they’ve tapped into something essential to us, at the heart of who we are and how we live.
Writing, it seems to me, is often taught, from the time that we’re in grade school, as the absence of mistakes—when you get your first papers back, and you have a little X that’s an err
or, another X that’s an error. Right up through college, I remember being taught that way, that careless errors, the difference between T-H-E-I-R and T-H-E-R-E—you get counted off for that.
And so every time you get a little check, then, you have lost points. And I lost points. But somehow you never gained points. You started off with a hundred points, and then for every mistake that you made, you lost points. If you’re trying to teach fiction writing or any kind of decent writing, any kind of real writing to students, the first thing you have to do is get them out of that frame of mind whereby you lose points for mistakes.
I think To Kill a Mockingbird is like Moby-Dick, in a sense; it’s not like you can’t find things wrong with it. When I read it as an adult, I remember thinking there were passages of exposition that I would have done differently. Or there were passages that were maybe a little bit clunky in terms of its style, although parts of it are just incredibly graceful, wonderfully graceful.
Great books are not flawless books. Look at the ending to Huckleberry Finn, maybe the great American novel—it is a huge misstep. You cannot imagine Twain taking them on that journey down the Mississippi and then somehow reverting into Tom Sawyer land at the end. It’s a betrayal of everything that he had done earlier in the book. It’s a flaw, but so what? The thing about writing is, you’re not looking for an absence of errors. You’re not looking for a pristine slate. You’re not looking for things to be perfect, but something has to hit you where you live.
There’s one of those columns in Newsweek or Time—a writer talks about five books that were tremendously important, and then, What’s a book that you’ve reread that didn’t stand up? And someone, I can’t remember who, named To Kill a Mockingbird, and I remember thinking, Whoa, maybe you need to read it again. Because that book holds up the way great books do. They just touch you in that very deep place.
For me it had something to do with that father/daughter relationship. It had something to do with a time when we really believed in justice—the necessity of justice as a part of our lives, the possibility of trying to make a just world. All of that was incredibly powerful. I think it’s an indispensable book.
Whenever a writer is gifted enough and fortunate enough to write a book as good as that, you can’t help but think, What else? Maybe that’s the fallacy. Maybe it’s a fallacy to think that if you could write a book that good, you must have had seven or eight others in you just like it.
There’s a line of logic that suggests, if you can do it once, then maybe you can do it again or again and again and again. Dickens wrote one novel, one great novel right after another. I know when I read a book like To Kill a Mockingbird and realize there’s only one, I feel a deep sinking feeling as a result of that. The one was a gift and you’d be pretty careless to say you deserve more. But some part of you does think, Why not more?
When somebody writes To Kill a Mockingbird, you just hope they’re happy.
Lizzie Skurnick
Lizzie Skurnick was born in New York in 1973. She is the author of Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading (2009) and is the Fine Lines columnist for Jezebel.com, where she writes about young-adult classics. A contributor to NPR, the New York Times, and the Daily Beast, she has written books for three young-adult series, Sweet Valley, Love Stories, and Alias.
I read To Kill a Mockingbird in class. I remember the edition. It was the yellow paperback with no illustration on the cover, just To Kill a Mockingbird in big block type and “Harper Lee.” I think it was probably the first novel that I ever read that fully inhabited a girl’s consciousness in a very immediate and complicated way.
I thought Scout was a boy for a page and a half. I was a very fast reader, and I wasn’t paying attention at some key part. I remember being thrilled when I realized it was a girl, but also very surprised, because I hadn’t read a lot of novels with girl protagonists who weren’t in hoop skirts and riding out West. I didn’t know the Southern girl tomboy. I didn’t really understand that genre of a prepubescent girl—and the novel is not about her growing sexuality, so that was also a new thing to me.
I think it took me awhile to really locate what kind of a character Scout was, because she is also a “character” in the best sense of the word. Generally speaking, a young girl in such circumstances is sort of spunky or someone you’re supposed to side with, someone who is going to have interesting adventures.
Scout is all those things, but it’s a dark, lonely novel from the beginning, in its own way. Scout is not a happy girl setting off on the prairie. Her life is very complex. She doesn’t have a mother. Her father is an interesting man, but he’s not like Pa in Little House on the Prairie. He doesn’t set her on his knee and play the violin all night, he doesn’t buy them tin cups and put pennies in them.
In many ways, her childhood is very lonely, and it’s only her interest in other people that makes it a full childhood. She’s really an explorer, but I don’t think the exploration is cast in any way that makes it seem fun or endearing. You get the sense it’s really how one might be as an adult, put into a foreign city, forced to create a life for oneself.
You’re not supposed to feel sorry for Scout. I never felt sorry for her. It’s only that when you go back and look at it as an adult that you see you might as well be reading Ethan Frome. It’s a sad novel in a lot of ways.
As a girl, I was never even interested in the court case. I felt like that was an explicit plot really put in for the adults. I know that’s the whole point of this novel: that it’s about the South, that it’s about justice, that it’s about how life doesn’t work out OK. But I feel that that’s something established within the first chapter. I didn’t need her to learn any lesson for it to become interesting for me.
In some ways, I think, for me, that’s the weakest part of the novel. It’s the lesson for the reader, really.
Going back and looking at the novels of the period of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, I’ve often noted that the girls are filled with a lot of anger. They’re difficult girls. They’re not necessarily the child you’d want to babysit. In fact, they’re definitely not the child you’d want to babysit. There’s nothing charming about them at all.
So that’s who Scout makes me think of. And in some ways, she makes me think of Laura [in Little House on the Prairie], although Laura is her precursor. I’ve always thought that Laura is interesting to girls. The reason why those Laura Ingalls Wilder novels are not about Mary [Laura’s sister] is that Mary is so boring. She’s got no conflict. She doesn’t struggle with life. Laura really is always trying to control herself and to make sure she doesn’t damage what she loves.
I think that’s true of Scout, too. She struggles with things in a very genuine way. She’s always having to ask for forgiveness or figure things out or repair things that she’s done, but she’s not a bad girl.
She truly struggles in the way we struggle as adults to figure out how to be in the world.
The second half of the novel, those grand themes of justice, injustice—those are about how the world acts on us. But Scout is really about who we are in the world, how we decide that.
Scout maybe doesn’t understand that she’s a seeker. Scout is maybe a little too young to feel justified in her curiosity about the world, especially when there are very few happy answers to the things she’s curious about.
I think they were teaching it to us with this idea of children can be exposed to the adult world, and here’s what happens when children are exposed to it: They learn. And I really felt Scout was interesting on her own. I don’t think she needed that case to become interesting.
Lee Smith
Lee Smith was born in 1944 in Grundy, Virginia. A retired professor, she is the author of twelve novels, including The Last Girls (2002) and On Agate Hill (2008), and a short-story collection, Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (2010).
The first time I read To Kill a Mockingbird, I was in high school and I was just knocked out. I was especially fas
cinated because I was from the mountain South, where we had no black people. We had our own sort of weird class system of who lived in the town and who lived in the hollers. But the novel was about a whole different South, and it was just incredible to me.
It made me think a lot about the poorer people among us, the marginalized people in the Appalachian South who were discriminated against in so many ways. You can’t really romanticize racism, but picturesque poor people on their porches chewing tobacco and stuff, you can.
So To Kill a Mockingbird brought me a whole new awareness of people who were other, and what they suffered because of it. It is fair to say that this novel changed my life—changed the way I thought about race, class, and discrimination.
Another experience that I had with this book was between my junior and senior year in college, the summer of ’66. I was working for a newspaper in Richmond, Virginia, and Hanover County had just banned To Kill a Mockingbird then. [When a prominent physician protested that a novel with rape in its plot was “improper for our children to read,” the Hanover County school board ordered all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird off the shelves, calling it “immoral literature.”] The editor of the newspaper said that any child who wanted a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird should write him a personal letter and tell him why, and we would send them one. Well, I was the one who sent ’em. I thought I was going to be a star reporter, of course, and basically all I did was address copies of To Kill a Mockingbird and send them out to every child in Hanover County. I thought it was fabulous, though. I was proud to be doing this.
Scout, Atticus, & Boo Page 14