Today is the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird — a novel that spoke in fine moral tones about racism with utter clarity, and that has never been out of print.
NPR notes:
The questions raised by the book were part of a conversation that echoed around the country. It’s a conversation that is still going on, and the book endures because people can relate to it in so many different ways.
“It’s about race, it’s about prejudice, it’s about childhood, it’s about parenting, it’s about love, it’s about loneliness — there’s something for everyone,” [author Mary McDonagh] Murphy says.
To Kill a Mockingbird didn’t change everyone’s mind, but it did open some. And it made an impression on many young people who, like Scout, were trying to get a grip on right and wrong in a world that is not always fair.
As you know, the book inspired a film adaptation two years later, forever intertwining it with Gregory Peck in the popular imagination:
Huffington Post’s Danny Groner has assembled a few tributes on the book’s anniversary and its impact using popular voices. Here’s one from Tom Brokaw:
What I thought, when I went back and read those passages again, there was this absence of piety, which I think makes the book really honest. There was self-doubt. Atticus knew that he wasn’t a perfect man. He tried as best he could to give Scout the big context of what he was doing and why he was doing it. In her youthful innocence, she was asking all the right questions. So it’s no wonder to me why it’s so popular as a book and it will be for a long time.