Expert: Joseph Bentz Discusses Harper Lee's Death and her Legacy, To Kill a Mockingbird

Joseph Bentz, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of English at Azusa Pacific University, where he teaches American literature and writing. He has written four novels and four non-fiction books on faith, with a fifth, Nothing Is Wasted, to be released this spring.

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird and one of the most beloved American novelists, died on February 19, 2016, at age 89. Lee’s first novel has been a staple of high school reading lists for more than 50 years, and many readers fondly recall it as one of their most powerful early reading experiences.

For more than half a century, it was Lee’s only book. Last year, she shocked the reading public by releasing a second novel, Go Set a Watchman, the earlier manuscript from which Mockingbird would come. Sales skyrocketed, but controversy arose because some thought it tainted the reputation a beloved literary hero, Atticus Finch, well-known not only from the novel, but also from Gregory Peck’s portrayal of him in the film version of Mockingbird. Watchman presents an older, crankier, more complex Atticus, much more a man of his times in his racist views and less purely noble outlook.

Go Set a Watchman shows literary merit, but there seems little doubt that Harper Lee’s reputation will stand mostly on To Kill a Mockingbird, a true American classic. The following article was published on the 50^th anniversary of that novel:

To Kill a Mockingbird Turns Fifty

Few books exist today that the majority of students have read. Reading lists in schools have become so diverse that students entering college have few books in common. One of the rare exceptions is Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, a book that many students share not only with each other, but also with their parents’ generation. This beloved novel, the only book its author ever wrote, celebrates its 50^th anniversary this year.

Although Harper Lee didn’t expect the book to do very well, it immediately achieved—and still continues to enjoy—phenomenal success. Numbers don’t tell the whole story, but they are one indication of the grip this novel holds on our culture. In its first year, the book sold over half a million copies and was translated into ten languages. It won the Putlizer Prize in 1961, and in 1962 the film version starring Gregory Peck was made, earning eight Academy Award nominations and winning three of those Oscars.¹

Twenty years later, the novel had sold more than 15 million copies and had been translated into forty languages.² In 1988 researcher Arthur N. Applebee determined that the book was required in 69 percent of public high schools. Comparing its sales figures to those of all the other novels sold in the United States during the first seventy-five years of the twentieth century, Mockingbird was the third-best-selling novel during that period. More recently, more than a million copies of the book sold in 2001 alone.³

Not only have a high percentage of people read the book, but they also speak of it with an intensity and sense of personal connection reserved for few other novels. Ask people about it, and they often say it is their favorite book or the one they remember most from high school. They love it for many reasons—the strong, kind and heroic Atticus Finch; the smart and resourceful young narrator, Scout; the message against racism, the glimpse into the details of small-town Southern life of the 1930s; the absorbing writing style that invites the reader in.

The book is now widely seen as a “high school book,” even though Lee didn’t write it with that intention. It isn’t studied much in college, and it hasn’t received the kind of attention from literary scholars that its success might indicate it deserves. Although it has sometimes been banned from classrooms and school libraries because of concerns over the racial epithets and some other content that appears in it, it is mostly viewed as a “safe” book, warm and nostalgic. One of its original reviewers, Phoebe Adams of the Atlantic Monthly, somewhat patronizingly called Mockingbird “pleasant, undemanding reading.”⁴

However, overemphasizing the book’s high school-friendly, evocative qualities does a disservice to the novel’s complexity. As Alice Hall Petry points out, the book also includes such details as “a false accusation of rape, the shooting (seventeen times) of an innocent black man, the acknowledgement of actual incestuous rape, the attempted murder of children, the stabbing to death of the would-be-murderer, a man kept prisoner in his own home, and a lynch mob, not to mention a rabid dog, a widower struggling to raise two children, a lonely little boy from a broken home, a morphine addict, poverty-stricken children going without lunch, and a boy calling his well-meaning teacher a ‘snot-nosed slut’.”⁵

When I think of the book, what I like most about it goes beyond the big moments—the Tom Robinson trial or Atticus standing up to the mob at the jail. I like the little moments too, such as Scout’s struggle with her teacher who doesn’t want her reading on her own at home, her friendship with Dill and her brother Jem, the encounters with the cantankerous Mrs. Dubose, the strained relationship with Aunt Alexandra, the mystery of Boo Radley, and many other details.

It’s far from a perfect novel. It has problems with consistency of the child narrator’s point-of-view, as scholars have pointed out. But in spite of some technical flaws, it’s hard to think of a book more consistently enjoyable and compelling. Harper Lee has shied away from the worldwide fame the book brought her, staying out of the spotlight over the last fifty years, with a few notable exceptions. She is still alive on this fiftieth anniversary of her book’s publication. Speculation abounds on why she never wrote another novel. To Kill a Mockingbird would certainly be a hard book to follow. Perhaps this book contains the essence of what she had to say in fiction, and adding to it would be either redundant or a letdown. Maybe when a book is this good, one masterpiece is enough.

Notes

1. Louel C. Gibbons,To Kill a Mockingbird in the Classroom: Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes. The NCTE High School Literature Series. (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2009), 5.
2. Catherine Bernard, Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird (San Diego: Lucent Books, 2003), 8.
3. Alice Hall Petry, On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), xv.     
4. Phoebe Adams, quoted in Gibbons, To Kill a Mockingbird in the Classroom, 81.
5. Petry, On Harper Lee, xix.

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