TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD BY HARPER LEE

A great summer read to which we have 3 readers already committed. If anyone else would like to join us just slip your name on the thread. A drawing for a prize will be made at summer's end with all names of those who read and reviewed the book being entered.
I hope a lot of you will join in this read of one of America's National Treasures.

It is indeed a treasure. It is my favorite all-time book. Since I read this in 1969, I've devoured many books. I try to re-read To Kill A Mockingbird every year. Thanks Belva for starting this thread which now gives me solid reason to read this marvelous book again.

♥ :-)

So the list of readers/possible readers/followers is growing. Thus far we have:
LizzieD
marell: has completed the read
Whisper1
souloftherose
aliciamay: has completed the read
wookiebender
bryanoz
clfisha
The_Hibernator
Crazymamie
DeltaQueen50: has completed the read
ALWINN: has completed the read
Brit84
Soupdragon
TinaV95
fmgee: has completed the read
rainpebble: has completed the read

There is also a thread set up on the 100 book gig here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/154783

Feel free to comment on either or both.

I am hoping to join in on this read. To Kill A Mockingbird is one of my all-time favorites and I haven't read it in many years. Oh who am I kidding, mark me down as a yes!

Yay - the group read is happening! I am very much looking forward to a re-read since I have forgotten so much about this book. I have the audio version narrated by Sissy Spacek and I hope to start it this week.

This is also one of my all-time favorite books. I will try to reread it with all of you this month.

I read the book a few months ago but I will be following and putting my two cent. Loved this book as well.

Well I finished this weekend. It was like reading it for the first time because I had no idea how certain events turned out. I really enjoyed having a child narrator - it was almost like an unreliable narrator because so much of the content was over her head (despite her adamant protestations that it wasn't). Such a great book.

Congratulations Alicia!~! You are the first name in the hat. Good job. I have a few to finish before I can get to To Kill a Mockingbird but I am so excited for this reread.
And I agree about the child narrator. It was a brilliant decision by Harper Lee to do that. I am so happy that you enjoyed your reread of it. Thank you for joining our 'Summer Read'.

Reading a bio on Truman Capote the visiting friend was actually Truman as a little boy. And rumor has it that Truman himself actually wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. Dont know if that is true or not but an interest bit of information to throw out there.

I might join in as well, will have to see if I find the time this month :)

I didn't sign up for the 75 challenge group this year (too much other madness going on) but I might gate crash for this read!

Oh Dee! Please gate crash!!

Hello Mamie, I've missed you! I must pop over to your thread soon and see what's going on in Mamie World!

I would love to join in. I've never read To Kill a Mockingbird before but I recently inherited a beautiful Folio edition so the time seems to be right.

Yes! PLEASE come visit! And you are in for a treat with To Kill a Mockingbird - it is one of my all time favorite books. And a Folio edition! Lucky you!!

I've never read it either, but it is sitting on one of my shelves right now. Is there a deadline or a date folks are shooting for?

oohhh I thought this was on the July list... I'll try to pick it up later this month as I have wanted to read this book for a long time.

16: Mamie, could you please give me a link to your thread? I can't seem to find it and am concerned I may have done something very silly like ignored it when I meant to favourite it, or something!

The Folio edition is still wrapped which is another reason why I need to join this group - to give me a good reason to unwrap it.

No worries! Here I am, Dee:

Mamie's 2013 Madness

Just finished this morning. As there is not discussion yet I don't want to say much. Wonderful book. I found it very easy to read, there was something in the simple language and how it flowed. So many issues in the book, very powerful.

Tina;
I threw this out as a 'summer read'.

So let's set the deadline for it to be read & reviewed, (unless it is a reread of course), by the end of the week of Labor Day here in the U.S. How does that set with all of you? If this works for all of you that would be: Saturday, September 7th at Midnight, U.S. East Coast Time.

There will be a drawing at the end of that time with names in the hat of everyone who read & reviewed the book. If it is a reread for you, just give some brief thoughts of the book on this thread. The name drawn will win................, drum roll please,..................a book!~! :-)

Since we are such a small group, let's just use this thread as the thread for discussion & comments also.

I will be beginning my reread of the book in a couple of weeks. I am excited to be reading it again. I gain something new and fresh with each read of To Kill A Mockingbird.

I hope you all enjoy your read when you get to it. And I see that two of us, aliciamay & fmgee have already completed their read.

I would like to join this read. It will be a re-read for me. For a long time as each summer begins I tell myself "I'm going to read To Kill a Mockingbird this summer," and then never get to it. So thank you for the spark!

Belva, my name isn't on the list, and it should be!
I guess I've really only skimmed it a couple of times, so this is somewhere between a reread and a first time for me.

I hope to get started on my re-read in a couple of weeks, I am really looking forward to this as it's been years since I last read the book.

>24 LizzieD::
LizzieD; I am so sorry. I don't know how I missed that. On my knees humbly begging forgiveness. ;-) All fixed now. When you settle in to really read this book I think you will be blown away Peggy. ♥

>23 marell::
You are so more than welcome. This is the first time I have been accused of providing anyone with spark and I quite like it so Thank You marell. And your name is now on the list as well. :-) Thank you for joining us.

I think I owe this group an apology. When I began this Summer Read for 2013, I didn't realize that your group already had a To Kill a Mockingbird challenge set up back in February. So I am sorry if I stepped on anyone's toes but am happy that so many of you have joined in.
I will have to find a nifty prize for the one drawn from the hat.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was immediately successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and has become a classic of modern American literature. The plot and characters are loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old.

The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality. The narrator's father, Atticus Finch, has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers. One critic explains the novel's impact by writing, "In the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism."

As a Southern Gothic novel and a Bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence. Scholars have noted that Lee also addresses issues of class, courage, compassion, and gender roles in the American Deep South. The book is widely taught in schools in English-speaking countries with lessons that emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice. Despite its themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has been subject to campaigns for removal from public classrooms, often challenged for its use of racial epithets.

Reception to the novel varied widely upon publication. Literary analysis of it is sparse, considering the number of copies sold and its widespread use in education. Author Mary McDonough Murphy, who collected individual impressions of the book by several authors and public figures, calls To Kill a Mockingbird "an astonishing phenomenon". In 2006, British librarians ranked the book ahead of the Bible as one "every adult should read before they die". It was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1962 by director Robert Mulligan, with a screenplay by Horton Foote. Since 1990, a play based on the novel has been performed annually in Harper Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. To date, it is Lee's only published novel, and although she continues to respond to the book's impact, she has refused any personal publicity for herself or the novel since 1964.

From Wikipedia

Nelle Harper Lee (born April 28, 1926) is an American author known for her 1961 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which deals with the issues of racism that the author observed as a child in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Despite being Lee's only published book, it led to her being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to literature. Lee has received numerous honorary degrees but has always declined to make a speech.

Other significant contributions include assisting her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood.
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Early life:
Nelle Harper Lee, the youngest of five children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch, was raised in Monroeville, Alabama. Her first name, Nelle, was her grandmother's name spelled backwards. Her mother was a homemaker; her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, practiced law and served in the Alabama State Legislature from 1926 to 1938. Before A.C. Lee became a title lawyer, he once defended two black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. Both clients, a father and son, were hanged.

As a child, Lee was a tomboy, a precocious reader, and best friends with her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote.
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To Kill a Mockingbird:
“ I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected. ”

—Harper Lee, quoted in Newquist, 1964

While enrolled at Monroe County High School, Lee developed an interest in English literature. After graduating high school in 1944, she went to the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery.

Having written several long stories, Harper Lee found an agent in November 1956. The following month at the Michael Brown's East 50th townhouse, she received a gift of a year's wages from them with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas."

She eventually showed the manuscript to Tay Hohoff, an editor at J. B. Lippincott & Co.. At this point, it still resembled a string of stories more than the novel Lee had intended. Under Hohoff's guidance, two and a half years of rewriting followed. When the novel was finally ready, she opted to use the name "Harper Lee", rather than be misidentified as "Nellie".

Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an immediate bestseller and won great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It remains a bestseller with more than 30 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll by the Library Journal.
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Autobiographical details:
Like Lee, the tomboy Scout is the daughter of a respected small-town Alabama attorney. Scout's friend Dill was inspired by Lee's childhood friend and neighbor, Truman Capote; Lee, in turn, is the model for a character in Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Although the plot involves an unsuccessful legal defense similar to one undertaken by her attorney father, the 1931 landmark Scottsboro Boys interracial rape case may also have helped to shape Lee's social conscience.

While Lee has downplayed autobiographical parallels in the book, Truman Capote, mentioning the character Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, described details he considered biographical: "In my original version of Other Voices, Other Rooms I had that same man living in the house that used to leave things in the trees, and then I took that out. He was a real man, and he lived just down the road from us. We used to go and get those things out of the trees. Everything she wrote about it is absolutely true. But you see, I take the same thing and transfer it into some Gothic dream, done in an entirely different
way."
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After To Kill a Mockingbird:

After completing To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee accompanied Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to assist him in researching what they thought would be an article on a small town's response to the murder of a farmer and his family. Capote expanded the material into his best-selling book, In Cold Blood (1966).

Since publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee has granted almost no requests for interviews or public appearances and, with the exception of a few short essays, has published nothing further. She did work on a second novel — The Long Goodbye — but eventually filed it away unfinished. During the mid-1980s, she began a factual book about an Alabama serial murderer, but also put it aside when she was not satisfied. Her withdrawal from public life prompted unfounded speculation that new publications were in the works.

Lee said of the 1962 Academy Award-winning screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird by Horton Foote: "I think it is one of the best translations of a book to film ever made."

She became a friend of Gregory Peck's and remains close to the actor's family; Peck's grandson, Harper Peck Voll, is named after her. Peck won an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, the father of the novel's narrator, Scout.

In June 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Lee to the National Council on the Arts.
In 1966, Lee wrote a letter to the editor in response to the attempts of a Richmond, Virginia, area school board to ban To Kill a Mockingbird as "immoral literature":
“ Recently I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board's activities, and what I've heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read.

Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that “To Kill a Mockingbird” spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is "immoral" has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.

I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism. Therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.”

James J. Kilpatrick, the editor of The Richmond News Leader, started the Beadle Bumble fund to pay fines for victims of what he termed "despots on the bench". He built the fund using contributions from readers and later used it to defend books as well as people. After the board in Richmond ordered schools to dispose of all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird, Kilpatrick wrote, "A more moral novel scarcely could be imagined." In the name of the Beadle, he then offered free copies to children who wrote in and by the end of the first week, he had given away 81 copies.

When Lee attended the 1983 Alabama History and Heritage Festival in Eufaula, Alabama, she presented the essay "Romance and High Adventure".

For many years, Lee split her time between an apartment in New York and her sister's home in Monroeville. She accepted honorary degrees but declined to make speeches. In March 2005, she arrived in Philadelphia – her first trip to the city since signing with publisher Lippincott in 1960 – to receive the inaugural ATTY Award for positive depictions of attorneys in the arts from the Spector Gadon & Rosen Foundation. At the urging of Peck's widow, Veronique Peck, Lee traveled by train from Monroeville to Los Angeles in 2005 to accept the Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award. She also attended luncheons for students who have written essays based on her work, held annually at the University of Alabama. On May 21, 2006, she accepted an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame; graduating seniors saluted her with copies of Mockingbird during the ceremony.

On May 7, 2006, Lee wrote a letter to Oprah Winfrey (published in O, The Oprah Magazine in July 2006). Lee wrote about her love of books as a child and her dedication to the written-word. "Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books."

While attending an August 20, 2007, ceremony inducting four members into the Alabama Academy of Honor, Lee responded to an invitation to address the audience with: "Well, it's better to be silent than to be a fool."

In a 2011 interview with an Australian newspaper, Lee's close friend, Rev. Dr. Thomas Lane Butts, said Lee now lives in an assisted-living facility, wheelchair bound, partially blind and deaf, and suffering from memory loss. Butts also shared that Lee told him why she never wrote again, "Two reasons: one, I wouldn't go through the pressure and publicity I went through with To Kill a Mockingbird for any amount of money. Second, I have said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again."
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Presidential Medal of Freedom:

On November 5, 2007, George W. Bush presented Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This is the highest civilian award in the United States and recognizes individuals who have made "an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors".
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Lawsuit to regain copyright:

On May 3, 2013, Lee filed a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan to regain the copyright to To Kill A Mockingbird. She wants unspecified damages from a son-in-law of her former literary agent and related entities. Lee claims that the man "engaged in a scheme to dupe" her into assigning him the copyright on the book in 2007, when her hearing and eyesight were in decline and she was residing in an assisted living facility after having suffered a stroke.
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Fictional portrayals:

Harper Lee was portrayed by Catherine Keener in the film Capote (2005), by Sandra Bullock in the film Infamous (2006), and by Tracey Hoyt in the TV movie Scandalous Me: The Jacqueline Susann Story (1998). In the adaptation of Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1995), the character of Idabel Thompkins, who was inspired by Truman Capote's memories of Harper Lee as a child, was played by Aubrey Dollar.

ALL GLEANED FROM: Wikipedia

I lay awake all night reading To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Each time I read it I tell myself that I am going to pace myself. But I simply cannot put it down once I've begun. It takes me over. Brilliant, wonderful, complex, simple....
This is the perfect American novel.

There have been so many good, great, and wonderfully written reviews on this book that I don't really see one more making any difference.
What I will say is that this is a book that does not leave your heart nor your mind when you have finished reading it. It is a work more brilliant than brilliant. The characters become immediately enmeshed in your heart and you care about them so very much. Even Mrs. Dubose and Aunt Alexandra. And Dill had me wrapped around his little finger from his first appearance on the page.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a beautiful work of prose and once read one does not forget. I understand why my 95 year old mother reads it several times a year. It is, simply put, a book one falls in love with.

I finished the book this afternoon and oh, what a pleasure it was to read it this second time around. I'll be thinking about it for days to come.

One of the things I love is the "You are there" quality of the writing. I felt part of the whole thing, like I lived on Jem and Scout's street, was taking part in their games, drinking lemonade on the porch in the sweltering heat of summer, in the schoolroom and on the playground, in the kitchen partaking of Calpurnia's good Southern cooking, in church and in the agony of that courtroom.

A favorite paragraph:

"In summertime, twilights are long and peaceful. Often as not, Miss Maudie and I would sit silently on her porch, watching the sky go from yellow to pink as the sun went down, watching flights of martins sweep low over the neighborhood and disappear behind the schoolhouse rooftops."

I love that bit as well Mary. With this book it is so easy just to fall into the storyline and 'be' there. So I understand what you are saying. I am so glad you enjoyed it so much on your reread. I did as well. :-)

Just a reminder to those of you who are wanting to join in our summer read of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; you still have plenty of time. The deadline is Friday, September 6th, at midnight U.S. Eastern Time. So still plenty of time to sign up &/or if you have signed up, to read the book & let us know your thoughts. Happy reading.
hugs all round,

I've been tied up with numerous family issues, but I have completed my read of To Kill A Mockingbird and it was just as lovely a read today as it was so many years ago when I read it for the first time. I think I now appreciate the writing more while in the past it was the story that held me. Both times the characters have shone and I truly loved being inside Scout's head as the story unfolded. As Belva says above:

the perfect American novel.

#34 - Thank you for your comments. You expressed my thoughts exactly. I too appreciated the writing more this time around. There are so many exquisite details to be savored.

Anyone still reading here?

I JUST finished it. It was my 100th book for the year. It was my first time ever reading it and it was all that you said it was and more, Belva! I loved it. Immensely!

I am so very thrilled Tina! I have read it several times and still thrill to it. How can a book be that good?

That old story that Truman Capote wrote Mockingbird has been put to rest many, many times. It is generally accepted that the person who started the rumor was Capote himself.