Harper Lee

Good essay:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/sweet-home-alabama

(Lee's) Southernness, however much it is now the material of cliché, is still the most pleasing thing about the book—the kind of easy, Agee and McCullers Southernness (as against Tennessee Williams’s more Gothic version) that was as much a part of the postwar American novel as Jewishness, of which it was the alternative construction. Jews (in Bellow, Malamud, early Roth) were urban, worried, and compellingly neurotic; Southerners (in Capote, McCullers, Harper Lee) were rural, carefree, and absolutely crazy. As always with such things, neither construction makes sense unless you see the missing central panel that both are reacting to: the Wasp ascendancy, only just about to be called so—that average American whiteness from which Southern drinking and Jewish schmalz alike could seem welcome refuges.

RIP

never read the new one but it's hard to overstate the impact that mockingbird had on american culture

wait really?

aw man :(

RIP

:(

rip harper

what a fiasco with go set a watchman. such a blemish, horrible to see her be taken advantage of like that

my son's 7th grade English class just did a whole multi-week segment on To Kill A Mockingbird and connections to the civil rights movement.