Au Revoir To Kill a Mockingbird
My oldest daughter teaches bilingual English in a City of Milwaukee high school, and I greatly enjoy our conversations regarding the literary works she assigns. However, I was surprised when she told me recently that she and her fellow teachers no longer felt comfortable assigning Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird.
Published in 1960, Lee’s novel has for over sixty years garnered great admiration and respect as an American literary work. Many have considered the novel’s Atticus Finch to be an inspiring lawyer hero and taken the novel’s law-related narrative to be one of courageous resistance to racial injustice. As recently as ten years ago, virtually every American high schooler was expected to have read To Kill a Mockingbird Bird.
Why has the novel fallen so precipitously? I can think of at least three developments that have hurt its standing: