Still Singing After All These Years

Scout, Atticus & Boo consists of a foreword by the popular novelist Wally Lamb, an introduction with biographical information by Mary McDonagh Murphy, and twenty-six monologues by readers of To Kill a Mockingbird. This gathering of voices by Murphy celebrates the novel's fifty years; certainly any work of literature that has been a required assignment in school districts and a source of adults' reading pleasure for that long deserves a collection of thoughtful responses. Many of the twenty-six individuals who discuss Harper Lee's novel are writers. Some are well known (Oprah and Andrew Young, for example) and others perhaps unknown outside of their home community of Monroeville, Alabama, where Lee grew up, continues to live, and from which she derived the cultural habits and conflicts of her fictional Maycomb, Alabama.

The novel's plot, with its focus on the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman, would seem to place it off-limits for middle school students. The courtroom proceedings raise—without forcefully confronting—issues of physical abuse and incest within the teenaged white accuser's family, as well as her lust for the married black man who is on trial. Much of this provocative courtroom testimony is included in dramatic form, even though the narrator, eight-year-old Scout Finch, daughter of the defendant's lawyer Atticus, cannot fully comprehend the exchanges her father has with the individuals who testify. This is an adult plot. But what many of the commentators remember most is the narrator's voice: inquisitive, comical, gender-defying Scout, who discusses her life from ages six through nine. At times, subtle shifts in the narrative remind readers that the adult Scout provides oversight on the characters and events in her 1930s community.

Personal admiration for the voice and character of Scout is expressed by many of this book's contributors. Though a number note the influence of Mark Twain on Lee, of Huck's voice on Scout's, readers embrace Scout to an extreme that Huck never enjoyed; younger readers wanted to be her, regardless of their gender. Understandably, other responses are common. A number reflect on Lee's lengthy literary silence—five decades without a follow-up novel. Some congratulate her for not publishing a second novel that would suffer by comparison to her first. Others begrudgingly admit that they are "greedy" for more, with a couple of writers questioning how a talented artist could silence her creativity. Scott Turow, the author of nine novels, including Presumed Innocent, said, "I cannot imagine what drove [Harper Lee] into silence, although Hemingway said that all writers really tell one story, so maybe she felt she told the story she had to tell. I don't know. It's a frightening thing to another novelist to see somebody write a book that good and then shut up. It is a great puzzle" (197-98). Allan Gurganus, author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, admits that for the past few years he's been "heedless of publication," though he still writes: "I have beautiful things that I will someday publish, but I don't feel in any real hurry. But if I couldn't do it, I would feel like a rattlesnake with the venom backed up in me" (102-03).

There is much consideration about whether the 1962 movie version's achievement equals that of the novel. Inevitably, reflections on Atticus and Gregory Peck's depiction of him, and Scout and Mary Badham's depiction of her, blur as individuals attempt to describe them. The commentators have little to say about Calpurnia's crucial role, though two of them complain that her character is diminished in the film version, which may in turn explain the minimal attention she receives in Scout, Atticus & Boo. Also, because Lee long ago acknowledged that her memories of her childhood spent...