"The celebrations will last the summer, as befits the 50th anniversary of the book that British librarians a few years ago voted top of a must-read list before you die (ahead of the likes of the Bible, Orwell's 1984 and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, to name but three others in the top 10). There's just one problem. The guest of honour at the party almost certainly won't show up.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's haunting and inspiring novel about the collision of childhood innocence with the realities of race and racial injustice in the Depression-era South, was first published in July 1960. Since then, it has sold about a million copies a year, become a fixture on every school reading list in the country, and been translated into 40 languages. But Lee herself more or less vanished from the face of the earth. She is 84 now, and living in a retirement home in the small, God-fearing town of Monroeville where she was born. It is a place of 7,000 inhabitants in deepest Alabama, with 28 churches and where everyone refers to the most famous, if rarely sighted, local resident by her first name of Nelle."
From The Independent. Continue reading here.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's haunting and inspiring novel about the collision of childhood innocence with the realities of race and racial injustice in the Depression-era South, was first published in July 1960. Since then, it has sold about a million copies a year, become a fixture on every school reading list in the country, and been translated into 40 languages. But Lee herself more or less vanished from the face of the earth. She is 84 now, and living in a retirement home in the small, God-fearing town of Monroeville where she was born. It is a place of 7,000 inhabitants in deepest Alabama, with 28 churches and where everyone refers to the most famous, if rarely sighted, local resident by her first name of Nelle."
From The Independent. Continue reading here.
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