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Angle: relatability

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Angle: focus

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Extract from ‘‘Racial Violence in Faulkner’s Dry September and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird’’ by Iulia Andreea Mili

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Extract from ‘‘Racial Violence in Faulkner’s Dry September and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird’’ by Iulia Andreea Mili

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Extracts from BBC article on UK reception of TKAMB

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Extracts from BBC article on UK reception of TKAMB

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review extract

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Extract from ‘‘Intruders in the Dust:  The Representation of Racial Problems  in Faulkner's Novel and in the MGM Film Adaptation’’ by Terry Heller

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Extract from ‘‘Intruders in the Dust:  The Representation of Racial Problems  in Faulkner's Novel and in the MGM Film Adaptation’’ by Terry Heller

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Nawel

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film review

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Earlier in this series, I excluded Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852) from this series on the grounds that, in the 19th century, much of its phenomenal popularity derived from its timely advocacy of abolition in the run-up to the American civil war. Similarly, To Kill a Mockingbird owed some of its success to extra-literary circumstances: it was published in the year JFK went to the White House, then caught the mood of the civil rights movement,sold tens of millions of copies, and inspired a movie classic starring Gregory Peck. But, where Uncle Tom's Cabin is a simple tale with an explicit moral, intended to change hearts and minds, Harper Lee's only published book to date is a complex and subtle work of literature that has inspired and influenced generations of schoolchildren in the US and, most especially, in the UK. It's that rare thing: a truly popular classic.

Narrated by Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, at the outset the six-year-old tomboy daughter of widowed small-town lawyer Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird is ostensibly about race prejudice in the American south. At the core of its main plot is the trial of Tom Robinson, an African-American accused of raping a white girl. When Atticus Finch is instructed to conduct Robinson's defence, his fortune-cookie declaration that "You never really understand a person until ... you climb inside his skin" becomes the rhetorical heart of a novel based on Nelle Harper Lee's formative years in the Alabama of the 1930s. Scout's coming of age, another major strand in the story, will involve her realisation that "Boo" Radley is a benign mystery in her life and that many childhood terrors have mature meaning.

For all Atticus Finch's noble defence, Robinson is convicted by an all-white jury, condemned to death, and shot dead while attempting a jailbreak. The death of an innocent man is linked to the dominant metaphor expressed in the novel's title. The mockingbird ( Mimus polyglottos), a thrush-like bird with a long tail, creamy grey breast and white flashes, is a popular creature in American folklore. For Harper Lee it is the quintessence of innocence and the goodness of the natural world. Mockingbirds, says one character, "don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird".

A note on the text

To Kill a Mockingbird was published by JB Lippincott on 11 July 1960. It was initially titled Atticus but Lee renamed it to represent a novel that went far beyond a character study. Her editor at Lippincott warned Lee to anticipate a modest sale of a few thousand copies. She herself once said, "I never expected any sort of success", and claimed that she was "hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers". This is disingenuous. She also remarked that "at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. I hoped for a little, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected." Instead of a "quick and merciful death", a Reader's Digest reprint gave the novel an immediate audience, with sales eventually topping 40m worldwide ( and counting). Despite her publisher's warnings, the book soon brought acclaim to Lee in her hometown of Monroeville, and throughout Alabama.

Critical reactions varied. To The New Yorker it was "skilled, unpretentious and totally ingenious". Time magazine declared that the novel "teaches the reader an astonishing number of useful truths about little girls and about Southern life". Some reviewers lamented the use of poor white southerners, and one-dimensional black victims. The great southern writer, Flannery O'Connor, said: "I think for a child's book it does all right. It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they're reading a child's book. Somebody ought to say what it is."

Within a year of its publication To Kill a Mockingbird had been translated into 10 languages. In the years since then it has been translated into more than 40, has never been out of print in hardcover or paperback, and has become part of the standard school curriculum. A 1991 survey by the Book of the Month Club found that To Kill a Mockingbird was rated behind only the Bible in books that are "most often cited as making a difference". Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writing in the Guardian, stated that Lee writes with "a fiercely progressive ink, in which there is nothing inevitable about racism and its very foundation is open to question", and compared her to Faulkner, who wrote about racism as an inevitability.

Further books from Harper Lee

American literature has several examples of one-book writers who burned out fast. In 1946, for instance, Raintree County by Ross Lockridge Jr and Mister Roberts by Thomas Heggen both became bestsellers and got the Hollywood treatment. But then Lockridge and Heggen became hopelessly blocked. By the end of the 40s, both had committed suicide.

Until last month, Harper Lee was famous as the quintessential one-book author, often the subject, over many years, of wild rumours. One of the most bizarre was that her friend Truman Capote (whose In Cold Blood she helped research) was the true author of Mockingbird. More seriously, she claimed to be working on another novel "ever so slowly", a manuscript entitled The Long Goodbye. But it remained unseen, and the rumours continued to ebb and flow.

But now we have a new rumour, and one that seems to be essentially true. There is, apparently, more to come at last. In February, HarperCollins announced the forthcoming publication of Go Set a Watchman, news which came with a quote from the 88-year-old Harper Lee in which she declared herself "humbled and amazed" that this book, revisiting some of her old characters, would see the light of day, 55 years after her first novel. Inevitably, there is controversy about the timing of this news. Harper Lee's lawyer, Tonja Carter, is at the centre of the mystery surrounding the book, which is said to be in production with a first printing of 2m copies.
To Kill a Mockingbird is published by Arrow (6.99). Click here to buy it for £5.59 Topics

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The 100 best novels: No 78 - To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

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Earlier in this series, I excluded Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852) from this series on the grounds that, in the 19th century, much of its phenomenal popularity derived from its timely advocacy of abolition in the run-up to the American civil war.

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‘‘Intruders in the Dust:  The Representation of Racial Problems  in Faulkner'sNovel and in the MGM Film Adaptation’’ by Terry Heller 

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‘‘Intruders in the Dust:  The Representation of Racial Problems  in Faulkner'sNovel and in the MGM Film Adaptation’’ by Terry Heller 

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Essay (extract)

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''RacialViolence in Faulkner’s Dry September and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird’’by Iulia Andreea Mili

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''RacialViolence in Faulkner’s Dry September and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird’’by Iulia Andreea Mili

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ESSAY (extract)

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Text 4 ''Everything That Rises Must Converge''

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Text 4 ''Everything That Rises Must Converge''

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Test CE

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complete short-story

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complete short-story

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To Kill a Mockingbird

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Dry September

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Intruder in the Dust

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trailer

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Intruder in the Dust (1949) Official Trailer - David Brian, Clarence Brown Drama Movie HD

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Subscribe to CLASSIC TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/1u43jDe Subscribe to TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/sxaw6h Subscribe to COMING SOON: http://bit.ly/H2vZUn Like us on FACEBOOK: http://goo.gl/dHs73 Follow us on TWITTER: http://bit.ly/1ghOWmt Intruder in the Dust (1949) Official Trailer - David Brian, Clarence Brown Drama Movie HD In 1940s Mississippi two teenage boys and an elderly woman combine forces to prevent a miscarriage of justice and clear a black man of a murder charge.

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film review/ synopsis

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Louis D. Rubin Jr., Publisher, Scholar and Champion of Southern Writers, Dies at 89

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Among Mr. Rubin's own critical works are "Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth"; "The Wary Fugitives," a study of Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson and Robert Penn Warren, four of the poets who established the literary magazine Fugitive at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s; and "The Faraway Country: Writers of the Modern South," a 1963 collection that includes essays about William Faulkner's legacy and the promise of a young William Styron.

Over more than three decades of teaching, first at Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Virginia and later at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was mentor to a host of writers with distinctive Southern voices and now familiar names, among them Annie Dillard, Lee Smith, Kaye Gibbons and Jill McCorkle.

With another student, Shannon Ravenel, Mr. Rubin founded Algonquin Books in his Chapel Hill home in 1983. Created to be a hospitable alternative to the publishing houses at the insular nexus of the industry in New York, Algonquin has published dozens of writers of fiction and nonfiction, both Southern and not, and even a few New Yorkers.

In the opening essay of "Faraway Country," Mr. Rubin wrote about what he considered the characteristics of modern Southern literature. As the 20th century proceeded, he suggested, Southern writers felt themselves both part of and apart from the rest of American culture. And perhaps counterintuitively, he posited Mark Twain - who grew up in Hannibal, in northern Missouri, in the 19th century - as nonetheless "the prototype of the Southern writers of our time."

"Like them he grew up in a small, contained community, and like them he was propelled by his art and his times far beyond that community," Mr. Rubin wrote. "Westward and then eastward he went, into the busy life of post-Civil War industrial America. By the accident of American history the country of Northern Missouri was not allowed to remain sleepy, Southern and contained; indeed, the economic and political forces that destroyed agrarian America were already at work during his boyhood.

"Only in the Confederate South was the industrialization of America arrested, by the military and economic defeat of the War, and communities like Mark Twain's Hannibal allowed to exist for another half-century. Not until the 20th century did the South feel importantly the effects of the industrialization that was changing the face of American life. Then it too produced distinguished writers whose art mirrored the transition of one kind of life to another."

Louis Decimus Rubin Jr. was born in Charleston, S.C., on Nov. 19, 1923. His father was an electrical contractor whose business foundered during the Depression but who, after moving to Richmond, had a second career as a popular amateur meteorologist known in Virginia as the Weather Wizard.

Young Louis spent two years at the College of Charleston and then served in the Army during World War II, working for the base newspaper at Fort Benning, Ga. After the war he finished his bachelor's degree at the University of Richmond and then worked as a reporter and editor for newspapers in New Jersey and Virginia and for The Associated Press.

He later entered the writing program at Johns Hopkins, earning an M.A. and a Ph.D. (His Thomas Wolfe book began as his dissertation.)

In addition to his brother, Mr. Rubin is survived by his wife, Eva Redfield, whom he met at Johns Hopkins and married in 1951; a sister, Joan Schoenes; two sons, Robert and William; and two grandchildren.

"The nature of the daily editorial format was inhibiting me from communicating the complexity of a topic," Mr. Rubin wrote about why he gave up journalism for the literary life. In his later work he did not shy from the complexities of Southern culture, including its painfully ingrained racial prejudice, even when examining himself. Looking back on his return to the South after his sojourn in New Jersey, he chastised himself for having idealized the region.

"I had even rationalized myself into believing - more accurately, into thinking I believed - that Southern racial arrangements were something other than the flagrant injustice they were to black Southerners," he wrote. "I don't think I was really a segregationist, but such was my sense of alienation from the urban metropolitan milieu I now found myself inhabiting that I had managed to persuade myself that the recent Brown v. Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court was - well, not so much wrong as premature, too far ahead of its time. Such was the power of nostalgia and the wish to Go Home Again."

Correction: November 22, 2013

Correction: November 22, 2013

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Louis D. Rubin Jr., Publisher, Scholar and Champion of Southern Writers, Dies at 89

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Among Mr. Rubin's own critical works are "Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth"; "The Wary Fugitives," a study of Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson and Robert Penn Warren, four of the poets who established the literary magazine Fugitive at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s; and "The Faraway Country: Writers of the Modern South," a 1963 collection that includes essays about William Faulkner's legacy and the promise of a young William Styron.

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On one of the best days of my working life, I read a glowing review of my debut novel My Sunshine Away in Kirkus Reviews, a highly respected journal in America. The review ended with a proclamation that I have since gleefully memorised: "Celebrate, fiction lovers: The gods of southern gothic storytelling have inducted a junior member."

As a guy from Louisiana, as deep as the American south gets, this was mighty stuff for my ego. Still, I felt uncomfortable with that phrase "southern gothic": had I written that kind of novel? The truth is, I hadn't set out to. I had just tried to tell a story in the best way I knew how. And yet there I was, supposedly, at a cocktail party with some of the writers I most admired: William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harper Lee, Barry Hannah, Zora Neale Hurston. I didn't know what to make of it. And, now that my novel is being published in the UK, and with the literary world abuzz about Lee's forthcoming Go Set a Watchman, I also have to wonder: why is southern gothic literature so popular across the globe?

Here's my idea: the southern gothic is like a trusty bicycle. (Note: this is not simply because southerners talk too slowly for a car metaphor to work. It is instead a kinship in the way the two things are assembled and ornamented. Stay with me.)

First, the handlebars. What steers the southern gothic is authenticity. Look at the places the aforementioned "gods" of the genre are from. Mississippi. Georgia. Alabama. Florida. These are writers who spend their imaginative energy on the "postage stamp" of soil beneath their feet; writers who know, in other words, of what they speak. What makes this crucial to the southern gothic is similar to what makes a brother able to poke fun at his sister while beating up anyone else who dares make fun of her. It's a family thing; an intimacy that readers from anywhere can relate to. Show me a southern gothic novel written by someone who's not from the south and the odds are that I'll show you a bad novel. To put it more smartly, there is a difference between writing from the culture and writing about or, at its worst, above it. The southern gothic is, always, from the culture.

Second, the basket. The basket on this bike is full of vivid characters. Scholars are quick to call them "grotesques", as they are often deformed or bigoted or violent but, in the hands of a southern writer, they are written with empathy and truth. Tom Robinson, for example, the black man accused of raping a white woman in Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, has a lame left hand. Mrs Dubose, the old lady who lives near the Finches in the novel, is a mean-spirited racist. For lesser writers, these are throwaway details used to make fun of the south. For Lee, though, Robinson got his hand stuck in a cotton gin when he was 12 years old; Mrs Dubose is a dying morphine addict struggling through the pain of getting clean before she meets God. This is not grotesque. This is hard work and a hard life, and these characters merely bear the physical scars of what many of us carry internally. Why do readers relate to this? Perhaps O'Connor nailed it best when she said: "I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear." The southern gothic, without exception, makes its characters loud and clear.

Third, the streamers. The bright streamers affixed to the handlebars of this bike are made of language. Southern writers are uniquely bonded by an oral tradition of front porch storytelling and find an outsized joy in constructing vibrant sentences (see Hannah's work for the most acrobatic example of this). After all, we feel, if you can't entertain your bourbon-drinking relatives, how can you expect to entertain a sober stranger? This is also apparent in the dialogue of southern gothic writers, who endow their characters with speech that is somehow wise without being didactic, as when the Misfit in O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" describes the suddenly repentant grandmother he just killed by saying: "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." This is a perfect sentence, partly because of its grammatical flaw, and these colourful phrases brighten the dark themes of southern gothic novels to make for surprisingly joyful reading.

Fourth, the front wheel. The front wheel is the landscape. As it is the first part of an approaching bike that one sees, it is also the first thing a reader encounters when they enter these novels: beards of Spanish moss, dusty gravel roads, stubble-grass in the cotton fields. The natural world is alive and well in southern fiction and deemed gothic by its pervasive influence on the characters and their actions. And it's true: the heat of the American south is indeed oppressive, and everything with a mouth, as they say down here, can bite. Yet it is ultimately the writer's reverence for the natural world that sets these novels apart. Even the very forthright Scout, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird, turns into a veritable poet when she describes her hometown, using alliteration in ways she rarely does elsewhere by saying, "grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square ... Ladies bathed before noon ... and ... were like soft teacakes with frosting of sweat and sweet talcum." It's a song these southern writers sing to the landscape and it is made pretty for all readers by their admiration of it.

Next, the back wheel. The wheel that propels this bike is violence. Nearly all southern gothic novels revolve around it. For some it is rape, others murder, and for many it is the violent nature of God as seen by flooded rivers and hurricanes (see Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, respectively). What this means to the genre as a whole is that all of its novels have inherently high stakes, which readers appreciate. These are not quiet and domestic dramas, although they may be set in quiet towns. IPnstead, people's lives are on the line in the same way that the readers' lives are from the moment they open their eyes each morning to the moment they close them.

Finally, the frame and chain. What holds this bike together and enables it to go is the tortured history of the American south. There is no way around it. From slavery and prejudice through the civil war and Jim Crow, the American south has a past full of inexcusable ugliness. However, this is not the whole story, nor is it what makes this literature endure. Instead, it is the type of hero this past has created that keeps southern literature relevant and popular, and this hero is the underdog. Although it has been said that every person is the hero of their own life story, it is more accurate to say that every person is the underdog of their own life story. And though the civil war is long gone, the American south still suffers from its past in almost every conceivable way, whether it be poverty rates or failing education systems.

Yet those of us living there today did not personally create these problems. So, when we struggle to do the right thing, it feels as if we are doing so against incredible odds. This, I believe, is what readers from all parts of the world most identify with. We are all underdogs in the trial of our lives in the same fascinating and multiple ways that nearly every character in the courtroom of To Kill a Mockingbird was an underdog: Tom Robinson, Atticus Finch, Scout Finch, and even the poverty-stricken Mayella and Bob Ewell. They all thought they were doing the right thing, and they all thought nearly everyone else was against them. As Atticus Finch says in one of the most iconic lines of all southern literature: "Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win." That is the definition of an underdog mentality, and a linchpin of great literature.

So, ultimately, the southern gothic is not held together by how different it is from its readers around the world, but instead by how similar, how respectful, and, in reference to this bicycle we've created, how moving.

But what about the seat, you wonder? The pedals? Well, they are built for you. Hop on.

* MO Walsh's My Sunshine Away is published by Viking.
Topics

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On one of the best days of my working life, I read a glowing review of my debut novel My Sunshine Away in Kirkus Reviews, a highly respected journal in America. The review ended with a proclamation that I have since gleefully memorised: "Celebrate, fiction lovers: The gods of southern gothic storytelling have inducted a junior member."

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Kerry James Marshall: Heirlooms and Accessories

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This is "Kerry James Marshall: Heirlooms and Accessories" by Smart Museum of Art on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.