On July 11, 1960, Nelle Harper Lee published her first novel, the incredibly renowned To Kill a Mockingbird.
The book takes us to the small town of Maycomb in Alabama. Lee takes us on a journey encircling the lives of the town’s many characters. Jean Louise Finch, a tomboy known as “Scout”, guides us through these relationships and the town’s tensions. Beyond her, there is the mysterious recluse Boo Radley and Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, a lawyer whose defense of a black man accused of raping a white woman becomes a driving point of the novel. This novel, a staple of classrooms and controversies, is a critical look at race and Jim Crow laws in the United States.
While To Kill a Mockingbird is a widly known best seller, it’s less commonly known that this book wasn’t what she had initially planned to publish. Lee had written an earlier manuscript, titled Go Set a Watchman. This book was sold to the publisher J.B. Lippincott and Company for $1,000 only after her editor, Tay Hohoff, suggested a revision of the story that expanded on flashbacks set during the narrator’s childhood. Lee then spent two years entirely rewriting her book to eventually craft To Kill a Mockingbird.
Lee’s book was a quick success. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961 and the book has now sold tens of millions of copies. As mentioned, it is a classic book taught in America’s classroom, and it seems unlikely that will change anytime soon.
Now, fans of Lee can also read Go Set A Watchman, the formerly unpublished sequel. However, the book has receieved intensely mixed reviews due to the racist views Atticus Finch holds in it. There are also questions of whether Lee ever wanted it published in the first place.
Regardless, engagement with these pivotal works is ever important, and now, in the wake of a deepening understanding of how necessary it is to read Black literature, especially so. On this day, take some time to read Harper Lee’s work and reengage with the themes she writes on so elegantly and emotionally.