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A $45,000-a-year school in Los Angeles is locked in a struggle with parents as administrators push for a more progressive curriculum that excludes classic modern American literature like To Kill a Mockingbird and the Lord of the Flies. Parents, faculty, staff and alums of Brentwood School began clashing over the curriculum after the school participated in #BlackoutTuesday, a social media campaign to stand against racism, just days after George Floyd died under the knee of a white Minneapolis cop last year. According to the Los Angeles Magazine, under a #BlackoutTuesday post that featured a black box, some alums criticized the...

Reacting to Donald Trump’s fury over a New York Times report that said the FBI investigated whether the president was working for Russia after he fired James Comey, Comey himself tweeted a quote by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made,” the former FBI director wrote on Saturday, adding an attribution: “FDR.” It soon became clear the tweet almost exactly matched one by Trump, issued on 21 November 2012, when the then reality TV star was digesting the re-election of Barack Obama....{snip} But it seems Comey might have been making a sharper...

Updated: 4:04 p.m. October 17, 2018 SHOREWOOD, Wis. (CBS 58) -- Shorewood Police say they have investigated after a threat was made on social media to lynch black students at Shorewood High School in relation to the play "To Kill a Mockingbird" that was supposed to have a performance Wednesday night. A 17-year-old male was arrested Wednesday around 3:30 p.m. for making the post. The incident is under investigation. ------ Updated: 1:14 p.m. October 17, 2018 SHOREWOOD, Wis. (CBS 58) -- The latest update from Shorewood High School is that no performance at all will happen. The decision came Tuesday...

In the 2018 DNC version of To Kill a Mocking Bird, Tom Robinson gets hung. Atticus goes to jail for shooting a dog. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkQUdFMF0Zs

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...

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)....

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,'...

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...

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.

There are few films that stir the heart and soul more than the 1962 classic To Kill A Mockingbird. To commemorate the Oscar-winning film’s 50th anniversary, President Barack Obama will introduce a special broadcast of a restored and digitally remastered print of the film on USA at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Saturday, April 7. Starring Gregory Peck as the heroically decent Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch, and based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel by Harper Lee, the film will air with limited commercial interruption. In a rare public statement, Lee said she was “deeply honored” that President Obama would be participating...

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...

Georgia had Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers; Mississippi had William Faulkner and Eudora Welty; Louisiana inspired the major works of Kate Chopin and Tennessee Williams. Alabama had. . .

In Santa Cruz, Calif., volunteers will re-enact every word and movement in the famous courtroom scene. In Monroeville, Ala., residents dressed in 1930s garb will read aloud from memorable passages. In Rhinebeck, N.Y., Oblong Books will host a party with Mocktails and a performance by the indie band the Boo Radleys. All summer “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be relived through at least 50 events around the country, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of a book that became a cultural touchstone and an enduring staple of high-school reading programs. Its publisher, HarperCollins, is trying to tap...

If there's one book you should read before you die, it's To Kill a Mockingbird. That's not my opinion. Apparently I was sick back in ninth grade when every other American kid read Harper Lee's novel of racism, moral courage and coming of age in 1930s Alabama. I read it for the first time only this week and have my misgivings. But according to the Guardian newspaper's Web site, a 2006 poll of librarians — British librarians — put To Kill a Mockingbird atop the list of books every adult should read before they shuffle off. Ahead of the Bible....