Free Republic

A school district in Wisconsin is mulling over whether to remove the classic Harper Lee novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” from its high school curriculum after a parental complaint. Parent Tujama Kameeta wants the Monona Grove School District in Monona, Wisconsin town to remove the novel due to the “48 racial slurs directed at African Americans in the book.”

The Biloxi School District got complaints about the wording in “To Kill A Mockingbird” — an American classic being taught in 8th grade English Language Arts classes — and pulled it from the curriculum. It was an administrative and department decision, a member of the school board said, and not something that the school board voted on. It happened Wednesday or Thursday. Kenny Holloway, vice president of the Biloxi School Board said, “There were complaints about it. There is some language in the book that makes people uncomfortable, and we can teach the same lesson with other books. “It’s still...

Author Nelle Harper Lee, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 for her book, "To Kill a Mockingbird," passed away in her sleep Friday morning at the age of 89, her family has confirmed. "This is a sad day for our family. America and the world knew Harper Lee as one of the last century's most beloved authors," Hank Conner, Lee's nephew and a spokesman for the family, said in a statement Friday morning. "We knew her as Nelle Harper Lee, a loving member of our family, a devoted friend to the many good people who touched her...

Nelle Harper Lee, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 for her book, "To Kill a Mockingbird," has died at the age of 89, multiple sources in her hometown of Monroeville confirmed Friday morning. Lee was born April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, the youngest of four children of lawyer Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. As a child, Lee attended elementary school and high school just a few blocks from her house on Alabama Avenue. In a March 1964 interview, she offered this capsule view of her childhood: "I was born in a little town called...

The controversy over Harper Lee's new "old" novel, "Go Set a Watchman," might be the most bizarre controversy yet in a summer of bizarre and unlikely explosions of national piety. Atticus Finch, the patriarchal figure of "To Kill a Mockingbird," has been regarded as an unexpected hero in a region that many readers thought was unworthy of heroes -- mothers named their children after him -- and now many feel betrayed because he emerges in the new novel as a man with unexpected blemishes, an authentic representative of his time (the 1950s) and place (a small town in the South)....

<p>A second Harper Lee book is coming out and is likely to be a wild commercial success. But let's be honest…the success will be fueled, at least in part, by a conspiracy theory.</p> <p>People will buy the book to see if they can determine if it's truly Harper Lee who is the great writer, or Truman Capote instead.</p>

In American letters and mythology, there are few characters as noble as Atticus Finch. The gentleman, lawyer, and single father from Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” has been the very model of masculine decency for decades. Whether through the dulcet delivery of the classic novel or the buttoned-up dignity of Gregory Peck’s movie portrayal, Atticus has been loved as few figures of fiction have. As reviews trickle out for Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman,” written before, but taking place after, her masterpiece, one bit of news has dominated: Atticus Finch is a racist. Had he been a historical figure,...

Two startling revelations about long-hidden work by "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee have stunned readers awaiting Tuesday's release of her new book, "Go Set a Watchman." Lee's attorney, Tonja Carter, hinted Monday in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that the reclusive author may have written a third novel. Carter wrote that she recently examined the contents of a safe-deposit box in Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, and saw the manuscript for "Watchman" lying "underneath a stack of a significant number of pages of another typed text." "Was it an earlier draft of 'Watchman,' or of 'Mockingbird,'...

The first problem in assessing Harper Lee’s first published novel in the five and a half decades since To Kill a Mockingbird is whether to describe it as her first or second book. This apparently simple question has been contested in the months before Tuesday’s much publicised and heavily embargoed release of a manuscript that reportedly came to light only recently. Chronologically, Go Set a Watchman is, in Hollywood arithmetic, a sort of Mockingbird 2, depicting the later lives of the Finch family – lawyer Atticus, his daughter, Scout, his son, Jem and their maid, Calpurnia – who appeared in...

The New York Times has its review up of Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman,” the sequel to the iconic masterpiece “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but there’s just one problem. It turns out that Atticus Finch is not the anti-racism crusader we all believed him to be. In fact, he’s “a racist who once attended a Klan meeting.”

Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical. Over her breakfast coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills recede and the red earth appear, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards, and in the yards the inevitable verbena grew, surrounded by whitewashed tires. She grinned when she saw her first TV antenna atop an unpainted Negro house; as they multiplied, her joy rose. Jean Louise Finch always made this journey by air, but she decided to go by train from New York to Maycomb Junction on her fifth...

Nearly 60 years after Harper Lee wrote “Go Set a Watchman,” the novel she hoped would be her literary debut, the 89-year-old author was handed a finished copy of the book at a private lunch in Monroeville, Ala., last week. Despite the manuscript’s long and uncertain journey to publication, Ms. Lee seemed breezily self-assured about the book’s highly anticipated release next week, people who attended said. After her publishers gave her the first copies off the presses of the American and British versions of “Watchman,” Ms. Lee was asked if she ever expected the novel to be published. “Of course...

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed, “There are no second acts in American lives,” but Harper Lee is out to prove him wrong. The beloved author will publish her second novel this summer. “Go Set a Watchman” was written more than 50 years ago — before her Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird” — but it was never published. In a statement released this morning, the 88-year-old author explained that when she was just starting off, she wrote “Go Set a Watchman” about a woman nicknamed Scout who returns home to Maycomb to visit her father, Atticus. After reading the...

To Kill a Mockingbird' will not be the reclusive author Harper Lee's only published book after all. Publisher Harper announced Tuesday that 'Go Set a Watchman,' a novel the Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed in the 1950s and put aside, will be released July 14. Rediscovered last fall, 'Go Set a Watchman' is essentially a sequel to 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' although it was finished earlier. The 304-page book will be Lee's second, and the first new work in more than 50 years. The publisher plans a first printing of 2 million copies. 'In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called...

WASHINGTON — One night last week Cody Keenan, the chief White House speechwriter President Obama has christened “Hemingway,” knew he needed help... It was after midnight, but Mr. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser and the writer of many of the president’s foreign policy speeches, was up ### reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” to his 4-week-old daughter.### The two men poured two single-malt Scotch whiskies and, with the baby resting quietly, began triage on Mr. Keenan’s prose. By 5 a.m., a more succinct draft was on its way to the president.

A federal judge has ended the lawsuit brought by Harper Lee against the Monroe County Heritage Museum, The Associated Press reported — two weeks after it was reinstated. The suit had alleged that the Alabama museum had profited from unauthorized use of her novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.” United States District Judge William H. Steele dismissed the case on Thursday in a one-sentence order after lawyers for Ms. Lee and for the museum filed a joint motion seeking to end the suit. The order did not reveal any settlement terms, but the judge said that both Ms. Lee and the...

Harper Lee, the aging author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” has reached a settlement in principle on a lawsuit alleging she was scammed into signing over the copyright to her classic novel by an unscrupulous literary agent who took advantage of her failing hearing and eyesight, a lawyer in the case says. Lee had filed suit in May against Samuel Pinkus and others — including disgraced journalist Gerald Posner — to reclaim the copyright. However, dismissal papers were filed in Manhattan federal court today by Lee’s lawyer removing both Posner and Lee Ann Winick, Pinkus’ wife and another defendant, of...

Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, has sued her literary agent for allegedly duping her into assigning him the copyright on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In the lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan, Lee says Samuel Pinkus, the son-in-law of Lee's long-time agent, Eugene Winick, took advantage of her failing hearing and eyesight to transfer the rights on the book, which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and became an Oscar-winning film. The 87-year-old says she has no memory of agreeing to relinquish her rights or signing the agreement that cements the purported transfer.

Reclusive author talks to Mail on Sunday for 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, but reporter had to promise not to mention her Pulitzer-winning novel: Along with Thomas Pynchon and the late JD Salinger, Harper Lee is one of the world's most famous literary recluses. But the author of To Kill a Mockingbird has been tempted out of her self-imposed isolation – by none other than the Mail on Sunday. Admittedly, Lee – who is now 84 and lives in sheltered housing in her childhood home of Monroeville, Alabama – gave away very little to the reporter, who had...

Did you ever consider the lead character in Harper Lee's fabulous "To Kill A Mockingbird" to be a feminized male not in any traditional sense manly? Atticus Finch, one of the greatest male figures in modern American literature? Well, that's what Jesse Kornbluth wrote at Huffington Post on the 50th anniversary of this fabulous book being published. For those that are fans of this novel like so many Americans, the following quotes from this astonishingly silly piece are guaranteed to offend: "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a woman's book. Written by a woman, Harper Lee, but more, written by a...