Mockingbird, Watchman, and Harper Lee
Introduction Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird , published in 1960, became one of the most beloved novels of the twentieth century. Lee’s fellow Southerner and contemporary Flannery O’Connor was mystified by its success. “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they are buying a children’s book.” O’Connor, one of the finest short-story writers in American literature, failed to appreciate Lee’s caustic sense of humor and subversive social criticism. In the same category is another classic often mistaken for a children’s book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . There will always be a place on library shelves for good stories, and To Kill a Mockingbird certainly is one. It draws the reader into a deep fictional landscape. Readers return to To Kill a Mockingbird because they want to walk the dusty streets of 1930s Maycomb, run madly through Boo Radley’s backyard at night, or watch the trial of Tom Robinson play out to its disastrous end. Lee’s storytel...