On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections (review)

A P R I L 2 0 0 8 151 study design also allows the authors to explore the development of gambling policies in these states in detail and, ideally, what is lost from the breadth of cross-sectional designs is made up in the depth of the coverage . Nevertheless, the authors left this reader wanting more detail and analysis regarding the administration and implementation of lotteries in these states, and a more involved discussion of the after-politics generated by the legalization of gambling. I was also left wondering why the authors dealt with seven of the eleven former states of the Confederacy and excluded Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia from their book. Nelson and Mason do a very good job in systematically analyzing the spread of gambling in the “deep” South, but I am not sure they got the whole story. This much they admit themselves. N. ALEXANDER AGUADO University of North Alabama On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Alice Hall Petry. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. xxxix, 181 pp. $36.00. ISBN 978-157233 -578-3. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, released in July of 1960, was immediately successful, earning favorable reviews in the United States and Great Britain. It sold more than five million copies in its first two years, stayed on best-seller lists for one hundred weeks, won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize, was chosen by several major book clubs including the Literary Guild, and was adapted into a 1962 movie starring Gregory Peck which won three Academy Awards. And its success is on-going: it has continued to sell approximately one million copies per year (with more than forty million sold to date), has been translated into more than forty languages , was listed on several lists of the one hundred best books of the twentieth century, and was named by the American Library Association as the best book of the twentieth century. To Kill a Mockingbird has been selected more than any other book for one-community-one-book reading programs. Strangely, scholarly attention has not kept pace with this popular success, even though studies have cited it as the book most frequently taught in public and private schools (in the U.S. and abroad) and, according to the New York Public Library in 1988, second only to the Bible as the book that has made the most difference in individuals’ lives. Early critical considerations include a 1975 essay by William T. Going, two T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 152 books in the 1990s (Claudia Durst Johnson’s 1994 To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries for the Twayne series and her 1994 student casebook Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird), some miscellaneous critical essays , and articles about Atticus Finch and the rape trial in law journals. New developments in 2007 may mark the end of that neglect. In November, Lee was inducted as an honorary member of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, one of the nation’s leading professional organizations, with a special session as the annual conference devoted to considerations of her novel. Earlier in the year the unauthorized biography by Charles J. Shields, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, was released. And in April, Petry’s significant scholarly work, On Harper Lee, was released. Described as “the first collection of original essays on the author and her magnum opus” on the dust jacket, this book is an important contribution to general readers and scholars. Petry, the editor of critical works on George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, and Anne Tyler, has brought together eleven essays including one of her own (“Harper Lee, the One-Hit Wonder”) plus a foreword by William T. Going and the editor ’s own twenty-page introduction. That introduction, with its four-page bibliography of primary works by Lee and secondary works about the author and her novel, provides an excellent overview of Lee’s life and the critical attention the novel received in its first forty years, and it provides an appropriate background for the volume’s essays by scholars from the United States, South Africa, and Ireland. Readers...