To Kill a Mockingbird

when he was nearly thirteen my brother jem have his arm badly broken at the elbow so opens one of the most influential books in american literature and j mcintyre and today on k pr presents to kill a mockingbird harper lee's classic is this year's read across lawrence book with discussion groups movie viewing and the stage production at a theater lawrence coming up we'll hear a scene from that production starring walt boyd and they'll be broken off but first to kill a mockingbird was an instant bestseller when it was published in nineteen sixty one a pulitzer prize in nineteen sixty one and has since sold more than thirty million copies in eighteen languages the national endowment for the arts named to kill a mockingbird as one of its first elections for its popular big read program on one level it's a book about scout a girl growing up in the south during the great depression her father atticus finch and the trial of an african american man he is called upon to defend on another

level it's about far more clearly lets rape rape is carnal knowledge of a female buyer force and without consent that's alan weil campaign and chatty apparatus to ray rice i cant do you think it is what course i do and don't saying that your scalp that's common is what school salmon from now on and we're the butt of the swan diffin do you have to understand something as been allowed a high talk around town that i shouldn't do much about defending tom robinson i'm going to

defend that man they say saving for a number of reasons the main one is a third didn't air on hold at my head and telling record represent this county in the legislature are going to tell you again not to do something again you mean if he didn't then that would seem to me when you have demands a market that's about why because i could never ask you to monday again to tell the truth and hope to get through life without a case of the sky and but judge taylor pointed at me and said you're it i mean do we know coming to scare you because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win you sandbag samarkand fat that only win outright and yankees will be fired now friends remember this no matter how bitter things get

there still are friends and this is still are holding a media acting want you to hold your head high and keep those fists down i hope you can get your once common now catch and megan's usual disease reasonable people go start graven they're doing anything involving the negro comes up the sultan of don't begin to understand that's it and that's about right and wrong suppose you're wrong about it was that most people think they get wrapped it all around there and others to think that and they're entitled to full respect for their opinion now it's about prejudice is about pride in there is that duality that all human beings have that nobody's essentially all bad are all good and i thought that more than anything else

she was able to capture that and the underlying theme is being sometimes treatment of blacks in the criminal justice system in the south as well as more than a slice of life in the south about a family in the godfather who's concerned about his family was also legitimately concerned about his community i would say it's about a lot of things i mean obviously it is a lot about sort of issues of every show all of justice and injustice and it's about small town lave it's about the sort of the growing consciousness of a child that i think is probably why it works because but as different things for different people who needed to kill a mockingbird is the first and only published book by now harper lee now her first name is her

grandmother's name a land spelled backwards was born in nineteen twenty six in monroeville alabama a small town in southern alabama where she still lives today monroeville is the model for the sleepy town of macomb the setting for to kill a mockingbird we stood silently down further listening the porch swings creaking with the weight of the neighborhood listening to the self people honestly i think very much too brain physically to the reader small town life in the south former supreme court justice sandra day o'connor it was typical in those towns that people didn't have anything to do she grew up having him children here

and he had to live by their lives and this is actually that's not unlike the life that i myself like growing up there remote cattle ranch without other people without television without diversions and again you had to make your own simon entertain make them is mostly modeled on lee's hometown of monroeville but nowhere is this novel more autobiographical then in the character scout biographer charles shields says that time boy scout nears the childhood personality of harper lee she wasn't like her classmates in that everything seemed to move too slowly from her in school she was very poor brother kurt masur silicon that really intrigued she was a nonconformist from the time she's very small her fourth grade teacher were shocked on the first days of school when harper lee call of our first name and when she was upbraided a b says

he never dropped yet aspect of being a square peg in a round hole she was a person who marched room drama and they are gorgeous very similar this is harper lee and scout is gil harper lee to it according to professor claudia durst johnson who has written and lectured extensively on to kill a mockingbird he was an avid reader still you know a very lively and a great personality let's play another humorist alan and his scalp being this kind of aggressive tomboy who beats up and threatens actual boys and the shias that episode where and

she is wearing all the time and say new president and ham at the dinner table and i think there are a lot of moments that are kind of the light of a temper and overall seriousness of the boat that was novelist curtis sittenfeld scout struggled to remain a tomboy even amongst tremendous pressure to be more ladylike it's a constant theme throughout to kill a mockingbird of a theater this year orders are late and now the uniform view here overall are free and developing your little girl in her novel to the korean he played world war ii he fight typically like little boy i you get a rifle for creative than that of a doll he had been

angry do not intellectually picnic at a freedom that we've not a while little girl in the title that's where we meet a gender issue with with an elite and they're coming into harbor into a little girl and to take away that freedom he wanted to direct her up in a little career and parade around it is by now over me as scout is behaving herself to please her and i knew was a big speech this tiny county public library and i think she has an epiphany which is that this is just not that work i cannot be like this because she puts on a dress she's just got the

serving trays and she's trying to be a good girl and it's just that we're getting this is a very early feminist novel one of the rats that's woven throughout this narrative is scouts personal battle her internal battle with what society expects her to be versus basically how atticus is raising her to be her own person and when he brings alexander into the house you see that that's the beginning of scouts battle in which which is going to go into her adulthood that they're they're always had a heart thing at her you know why are you dressed like this why don't you behave like this why you playing with those boys you know why you dirty you're not very ladylike any that alec is saying it's ok as long as you grow up to be you know honest forthright decent true

yourself then you have developed as an adult i've raised due to be a responsible adult but yet that's often not good at having the parent the deal the quote liberal unquote parent is not oscar the best prepare you for the heartache ahead if you choose to go off on your own path at a lot of the novel's very rich ambiguity the end is which way scott going to go and i am love that she leaves that opened she's a lot of things open and i just love that exciting that's within the great hallmarks of a lot of american literature and a lot of southern literature is that there is there really is a sense of an ending their left just open ended for the readers to decide you don't get that and dear reader i married him but if our protagonist scout had married him he wouldn't ban dill her best friend next or patterned after harper lee's friend said with truman capote he

became i really really want his family i know what the end of that that i want you can now again charles shields

well bill is modeled on truman capote lived next door literally next door to you know the way the bill does end till circumstances or berta soler truman's bill is living there because his parents as he says in the book a while and transparent and they deposited truman like a little piece of collateral damage with his relatives but they're next door to no reprieve county public library they used for toys and for their life a mansion a tariff ideas and of course he became a famous writer insurgency which when you think about it how how strange is that it's also important that both of them growing up in monroeville which is the most voracious readers and they read well above their age group again honey waltz harper lee discusses it i believe i think was in a letter to oprah winfrey in july two thousand six how i am books were the most

coveted items and they would go door to door trading books because i was only we've got new stuff to read so just the reading reading reviews of the two of them did and they would they would write plays and enact these plays they would act out novels but it everything for them these two kids could be both became great writers centered around reading harper lee and truman capote he's friendship continued through their teens and into adulthood we attended huntington college in montgomery alabama and law school at the university of alabama that left a semester short of graduation moving to new york to become a writer praying at every practice law a quarter to enter in her ninety minute elling you know what writing or your but

i don't think they'll go overhead the notion that he would actually practical i think you want to know about i think you know i couldn't thirty in a huge joke to me one time the real reason he entered lot you learned that want to give all i've read that undergraduate good and he and they are doing all reading he wanted to do i want to hear that we jokingly they add but very little grain of truth knell announced that she didn't want to continue that she loathed law could stand it show into that because it was a line of least resistance and instead you don't want your co writer and she knew she had to break out of monroeville even temporarily if she was going to make a name for herself as a writer and she didn't give encouragement that she did have some talent so she was it was bits new york in capote he

introduced her and i do believe it was he who introduced her to her editor at lippincott out even though he was at random house with bennett cerf so arrogant they were really good for each other because i think they made each other better writers you next year supplies as it's really good to be competitive with your closest friend because you get better at what you do know i'm sure father suspected that he was at umass urging truman in nineteen forty eight have published other voices other rooms you know the awful to reveal no literature that time when americans seen as an elderly thought i can do that too and after all childhood friend who wrote stories together truman probably occur to become your biographer charles shields every two years she worked on this novel at one point she got so fed up that she got up from her desk running to the window and through the entire manuscript is in tears she would spend an entire day just to get paid caller

editor table often than cotton told her what she'd done and take over the march out there you go when harper lee finished to kill a mockingbird it was an almost instant bestseller even before it was published in july nineteen sixty four national mail order book clubs have already selected it for their readers sales soared the following day she won the pulitzer prize and within you know probably about five years ago could have sold three to five million copies the players it's

bleak it's been nice in nineteen sixty one he can on adapting to kill a mockingbird for the screen producer alan pakula law offered harper lee the chance to write the screenplay but when she turned it down he turned to southern playwright horton foote i just felt that progress mr lowe town texas what i want like population how we had all the prejudices that the book exposes and i think a lot of the precious with the southern churches have this sense of place a sense of the label into something and this essential conflict is surrounded by a problem that we have so that song and i

thought they'd close all the characters and i thought to do a remarkable job of getting that kind of small town southern feeling of that period i knew the house they live in the new economy to play the same games i don't think that we got so tired curiosity and fantasizing not the same circumstances but the same result robert duvall make a deal lane the mysterious neighbor unraveling amid a certain question can you the day of perfume before but the government barred from harper

rather than have an endless fascination here you don't want an active going on so now each ross perot aimee mann and they come up with all kinds of schemes to get the reclusive neighbor out of his house believes the kid small calves but they never actually see him intel the dramatic end tequila mockingbird for us a

pretty big part of what that was again that's carried it appears through the eyes of activists or so many syrians and it was a pretty a landmark character and he's a pervading loving spirit is like an angel novelist elizabeth spencer and you don't have the same and they have all these theories are betting on land i remember we used to have has said how little mysterious ways to dare each other to go out and touch him actually given the bill if it got knocked on the london ron patnode you this town could be a parent a mississippi we had that steers people all places we were exposed on a cosmic gate not to go they don't want to go there like many of the other characters in to kill a mockingbird boo radley is based on a man rochelle neighbor of harper lee's again valerie reef and tanya walls of that to peek at shawnee county public library there it's a house down the street of boarded up houses

are young man live there who have been accused are really gotten some minor trouble with the law just minor trouble and his parents took him in the house and the house was boarded up and he didn't come out until he died twenty four years later he he appears also in truman capote he spoke other voices other rooms of the wrestling character so both capote ii and harper lee were using all those characters from monroeville to enrich their fiction they're all these dangers the mysterious dangers in this town gilead brings up his imprisonment thing that's so godlike years boo and how appealing with that needed children thinking there's a young man who was in his teens when they put him in that house and he doesn't come out but the central male character of to kill a mockingbird atticus finch an unconventional

father full of wisdom and affection i've always been struck by a novel that affect atticus is such a loving warm intelligent father to his children but he's a character enormous humanity gill has a key lime or talks about they count on him to do the right thing and i think that sums up that it is so very well he's a character who's a person who always tries to do the right thing that's what boyd who played the atticus finch in that the airlines production of tequila mockingbird thanks for the moment that all kinds of folks in a really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view declining services we don't

know the compromises they are the no it's an agreement reached by mutual consent to use way we're you can see the necessity to go and says will you keep the same justice meanwhile many things the whole center of the book is the love that the off the mood is scout the little girl i think that's clearly harper lee and then her love for her father is the motivating reasons for writing a and it's the core

of the book to me led by lily begin to say that he is the moldings barrett in the book and with these charities and he's getting his takes on the top an african american man who has been accused of raping a white woman despite intense pressure from the people of monroeville atticus defends tom robinson to the best of his ability what exactly is a gothic somebody's been telling you that now need it does cause you back nine eleven is one of those terms ignorant people use when the water col an ugly turn to label somebody it obama certainly am i do my best to love everybody baby it's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name do shows how poor that person is now in july this is the bows get you

down he's young enough troubles are only out series diy stand up for years without jen would be the one to lose his kid i thought i'd have more trouble with you they keep i had the way nobody nascar's speed you'll soon have to be keeping your head over fall worst thing once again that was watt boyd and naomi broughton half in theater lawrence's current production of development emerging he became a symbol of what the lawyers like to think we are justice o'connor in this case we know from the story that atticus was representing an innocent mean it's obvious that he cared deeply about the case and hoped to get the right outcome from an all white jury he represents i think the best of the legal professions so we like what we read before lawyers we like to

be about an actress one of the major themes of the book since he's smarter than lawyers is the idea of justice it seems to pervade everything and sometimes it seems to be defeated but on the harm in many many instances his word is getting ahead and his feelings about justice one if a synthetic man almost a good picture of this wonderfully sympathetic man was based on harper lee's on father athie weekly valerie reef her father like characters in the book was an attorney and a state legislator and early on in his judicial life he tried a case where two black men were convicted of were accused of murder they were convicted and they were hanged erin david the bodies were mutilated afterwards they were lynched but they were executed

by the state he never took another criminal case harper lee would have also been familiar with the nineteen thirties scouts parole case a notorious series of trials convictions reversals and re trials nine young black man accused of raping two white women on a train from tennessee to alabama what happened in that can only in about our invalidated by rome of fame an eerie chronicle in alabama northern alabama were called out for professor claudia durst johnson and no doubt the attitude toward white people on the hero graham a tory cuts on a heat and he found them in the novel and apparently the failures her father would

have been a member of a boar along with impurities in that trial about the time he got to college he already hand of their own for the coronation in india that the idea the people the black people he had been dealing with all her life and they're really evident from her college record riding have heard college bed and home editor editor of university newspapers oh he worked and wrongly for the right the right of african americans to vote courted they were kept from the po a very three minute and in the novel point out if they were

than they were on the jerry lee and so it would be impossible for a black person to be tried by a jury of the year yet in the book and the movie to kill a mockingbird atticus finch does his best to represent tom robinson before an all white jury knowing how wall and before the trial even begins in this country our courts over grade level us courts all created equal and more divorced the view from an integrity of our court system musician and teacher david baker there was something that modifies the ugliness of much of what was going on there was

always a constant presence and attitudes and he was somebody i was drawn to very very strongly the way he was portrayed in the book was such that he was almost solemn eye it is was and that was destabilizing influence to me throughout this book it actually has life comes along with his racial triumph here was an occasion and noma comes definitively many people and communities that i think for the most part black and whites so i think he feels that the need for thousands of the report via man first four year a profession in fact the role of atticus finch is so iconic and so powerful that many people say inspired them to pursue careers in the law there are more article about a war you think there are in

your yard again claudia dearest johnson over and over again people are petrified including my daughter literally that this novel is the one that helped me into the career of wall and i think part of it is the eight year academically he wrote because i think we were in had been before the novel appeared we were hungry for a key roll i gather can and we we although i think all that something we had our obligations in a world that we all want and i believe that had something to do with it it activated and idolized by the legal community people

children and buried in maine strongly influenced many young people to go last to try to become lawyers be an actress again justice o'connor i have a splendid young woman law clerk who grew up in a very tiny town in northern utah not unlike a lot tam that we see in to kill a mockingbird she read that book and it changed her life she knew after reading that book which he wanted to do her parents were not able to afford to send her to college and she took on two jobs to attend the state university where she was a star student and inspired always buy this book to kill a mockingbird also inspired le rat at ellsworth not to become a lawyer that inspired her as a writer of young adult literature ellsworth

is the author of in search of mockingbird the story of a teenager who sets out in search of harper lee he carried around her mother's dog eared copy of telemarketers fifty pound and about dna and she treasury the book woe a little help from the margin the mom made me that when he was in a school and youth the victory for him for that he never had the other traditional their only connection to be through that book and all particular mockingbird iron you're into right field the creature and then the day before he conscripted your father imagine getting remarried and he also give carrying on her mother's diary when she was fifteen and hear and it's covered their mother also wanted to be a writer and he even written a letter to harper lee and of content here and defending a poll though he knew who herbert the money to buy the ticket to

monroeville alabama and hope that meeting from barry idol pop art really it's one of the journey furious about the unexpected places people if you meet along the way in search of mockingbird it's often used to introduce middle school and high school readers to harper lee's classic to kill a mockingbird a book that many read for the first time as teenagers but the national endowment for the arts hopes the big read will encourage them to re read it as adults they would make their book i read in high school and i loved it then and when my daughter actually had to read it for her high school english class i re read it a long flight her hand you with that experience that made me think about global collective unit that require frequent her brilliant book on one of the something that feel for the effect of a good economic and fifty one of the first written i was skeptical about choosing this book for the degree because i had not read to kill a mockingbird since i was ten years old i read it at the age of

ten and i know forty five and i thought i was going to be reading a children's book and i cannot tell you how wrong i was that this is a book that can be read you can get something out of it as a ten year old and you can get something out of it as a forty five year old and it's an entirely different book and it is made and richer with repeated readings that after this discussion i want to go back and read it one more time one of the reasons for its intergenerational appeal may be that while there beams of to kill a mockingbird are complex the writing itself is relatively straightforward novelist elizabeth spencer happily has a relatively blame staff explain in declarative and just tells you what she watched women again i knew was a maori reef i think it's harder to write something that seems simple but iran is complex that it is you know to write my

mother is a fish and one of the early reviews and it's a cheerful low light look at life and it's a tragedy and it's a tragedy for everybody and part of this a structure very much like a shakespearean tragedy there are no happy endings for inviting both even even you boo radley the hero at the end he saves the children from being murdered just goes back to his house and shuts the door and she says i would never see him again it's a dark novel it starts out as these whimsical little vignettes of children playing during the summer enacting you're re enacting comic books novels here and there you know the little gifts are left in the novel betrayed but each vignette each episode gets darker and darker and darker as the novel progresses so then it turns into things like vignettes

like the kelp are you being castigated by by one church of reading these two children to church horrible horrible wife just the horrible hypocrisy of the missionary women then you have the whole time robinson story and you got a lynch mob in you've got a trial where the defendant loses work when he's patently in a sense turning into his murder i met all up you've got a mad dog in the streets and the whole thing komen aids in the attempted murder of two children so he just gets progressively darker which i think is an interesting narrative structure and fits within the gothic theme of so many southern writers of that period and since so yeah the trees in those said county feel this weight is upon the tent you have clocks that don't tell the right time the court of clock has stopped the watch

that who gives the children has stopped in a whole different time the only part that's the only time he's that keeps the correct time is atticus is you have dark trees you have blues has of course is architecturally just sat out the windows are shattered the doors are always closed and you had a culminating and howling night that you know the spooky is most got the night of the year having to do with and for again they careened different mtv in him into gravelly and in tom robinson it all go a unifying idea how do we deal with different hat we do and etiquette advice throughout the book that we crawl and somebody open a can

and to figure out they are feeling seeing what's bill back home and he goes in and she turns around and sees the world as he saw it from the porch and she says he saw his children are going to school and discovering things because he saw his children subscribe and sixties finally two years ago can do or are

doing harper lee wrote to kill a mockingbird in the late nineteen fifties but the setting of her book is squarely in the midst of the great depression although the issues of race and gender in the book are often discussed scholar claudia durst johnson says if the issue of class in this time period that she finds especially interesting usually they are in the first chapter is that without going through weekend when he referred to think that the basic conditions of the great depression which it may be done already the prayer now even worse depression for many farmers and especially the beginning of twenty ten it we all pretty rare for the new theater of the male would be referred to the time of

franklin roosevelt program but if it were aware of regarding it though the depression era that it turned poor white even more began life because they were in competition for work something we could get if there were a way they had the idea on the part of poor white is the upper middle and an upper class white they bite their racial discrimination were much more sympathetic to black when they were poor white and that becomes evident the book is well i think so there with that in here for recruitment on the part of the old they're armed group and i went to economic as well a rate that why would be hired in the hell

hole that white poor whites never wore white would be higher today do yard work and the other thing it around the house to the people have the money to pay for it but for white never were there with the fans of greater just shrugs on the part of the upper middle class but poor white man's body they're very excited it's published in the sixties it's written in nineteen fifty nine she still writing and fifty nine but it's set in the nineteen thirties well as with most historical fiction if you distance yourself for the president to give you more opportunity for freedom to harm that on the present without being too close to repeat or be too didactic about it and it's a lot like

the way twain sent huck finn thirty years the past you wise or plain writing a novel about slavery after the slaves of the trade others really a really plan on calling her book go set a watchman then change the name to atticus she finally decided on the tyrrell to kill a mockingbird how you when you get your first gun and that the june fourteen

for more moderate in their return the duration of appointing a house committee ratcheted tin cans in the backyard but isn't that sooner or later you suppose the temptation to go after birds to march but remember there's a sentence you a mockingbird why welcome because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy corn crib so we see lots of mockingbird it's easy to say john roberts every

major characters is really every good characteristic is a mockingbird and certainly just out herself the whole idea of her elephants being threatened every major character a character who has a part of the story arc is an innocent who has sacrificed until when the deal in the courthouse when they listen to the verdict and jill has to go running at that courthouse and takes what he thinks is his first drink of alcohol you know he he can he can't take it he he is so overcome by the injustice that this child hastert feels like he has to go drink and you never see till after that so in a way that that's what kills until figuratively gem is never the same job as the novel goes along is in

a lot of ways this is jim stories much as a scout story you know this is artist gets darker and darker and darker were where gemma pretty much becomes very pessimistic adolescent here he's seen such an ugly side of human nature and he's a distant her allies is all that he's he is innocence has been sacrificed scouts as well it's like once once the trial starts with a sourcing in the balcony and they see how humans treat other humans they're never going to be children again so they're all sacrificed on the trial just kills atticus we know is going to get to keep going but apart in dyes d apart his idealism is killed by the outcome of the trial and by tom robinson's shooting it's even dark

for someone like malian the mail is the countless bodies events but if you look at her life her father is dead she has no visible means of support she has to raise all the siblings what is going to happen to that whole clams she's the pariah egg and everyone hates air i mean what in the world is going to happen to that family even though they cost the whole all of the events and then look at our port tom robinson's family they're left without any means of support so we we see a lot of different mockingbirds including the character than radley again actor robert duvall he's mr and he's a person that lives next door to a bit of a reclusive the least in their voting laws much about him and that whole aspect of that mystery and a possibility of big guys magnified to the section of the kids dealers are

essentially a fuel made from a distance thank you how to relate is in the hands of the central theme of tequila mockingbird may again screenwriter horton foote i think it's a sort of humanity and its a fan since an accountant who think i'm a hobo was simply observing the world to do it and it sounded so we kind of thematic statement think about his contribution to these pieces at a time when and in nablus was completely segregated it never even crossed my mind that beijing was different you know and was only later and i was really made aware that there was a world out there where

there was not so sanguine about relationships the thing that captured me in the book is how much other people go through this whether theyre white are black you know to me the reason why i think that all the great books of it because somehow another they transcend this time even though in this particular book is a time with real will never be replicated again in the united states heard of aids huge po is is probably the fact that it's very accessible but then it also has to survive in large ideas are themes that gives you like small personal details about you know what it's like to live in a little time alabama they also it feels important sometimes intelligent things and this is true i think this plan accomplishes basis

one of those times when a book just it's a both and the bull's eye i think is the heart and you can grow up on a book like it's too few books have a basis in love hanging an amen than man thanks for joining kansas public radio as kbr prisons to kill a mockingbird to kill a mockingbird is the reid across lawrence selection for two thousand eleven with discussion groups movie dealings and a community theater production through the end of this month for more information about read across lauren daddy daddy daddy you that lawrence thought

well i'd be us or just enter read across lawrence in your favorite search engine source material for today's program was provided by the national endowment for the arts and their big reed program special thanks to walt boyd naomi broughton halftime he was empowering three thanks also to dan stones or mr hamann philip brunelle eric a cause and came out entire k pr presents is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas locally produced programs like a pr prisons are only possible because of the financial support of listeners like you we just finished up campaign for excellence two thousand eleven our spring membership drive if you called in a pledge thanks so much if you haven't done so already please so they're becoming a listener member of kansas public radio and do your part to help keep programs like this one on the

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