WORKS CITED
Shields, Charles J., David Kipen, and Erika Koss. "About the Author." The Big Read. Arts Midwest, n.d. Web. 15 July 2014.
So this is the last post I will write about To Kill A Mockingbird.
I thought I would read about Harper Lee and write interesting things I learned about her..
1. Her real name is Nelle Harper Lee. Nelle is her grandmother's name spelled backwords (Ellen). Fancy.
2. The book is loosely based on her life! As a child she was a tomboy. She would beat other children up on the playground. (Sound like anyone? SCOUT). Her father was a lawyer (ATTICUS), and once defended two black men who were accused of murder. Both men were hanged later on, after being deemed guilty...
Lee also had a childhood friend, author Truman Capote, who lived as a next-door neighbor in the summertime (DILL).
3. During the writing process of her novel, she almost destroyed her manuscript. On a winter night, she opened her bedroom apartment window and threw her manuscript out. The pages were later recollected from the snow... and I'm glad they were. Cheers.
4. The book was an instant hit. Sometimes with "classic" literature, their value and worth isn't realized until years after their death. But this was not the case with Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. It was published in 1960 and topped bestseller lists. It remained on such lists for 80 weeks. The novel wins the Pullitzer Prize for fiction in 1961.
5.It was originally titled Go Set a Watchman, then Atticus, and finally To Kill A Mockingfish. (1 million dollars to the person who catches this typo)
6. The first line of the Washington Post's review read: "A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird."
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