To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

21:29Jeff:Just like it goes on. He's he's just out there like this is what he does every night and he sits out there and he sneezes and they watch him and one night they see him pee off his deck and like a huge revelation to them but that they are so like intimately connected to all of their neighbors and woven into the fabric of this community that they're observing it but they're seeing it through these really childlike eyes and that Lee was able to tap into that writing as an adult. She was 34 when the book came out is, I think, one of the underrated pieces of magic that does make people feel affection and connection to this book.

22:04Yeah. And the sort of hybrid consciousness Scout has of Lee trying to capture the sense of what it was like to be eight, but also not holding in abeyance her own adult sensibility and reflection on life there and the people. And it's not quite Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. These are grotesque, but there is an element of this place is... People are weird. People are so weird. And the particular strangest of this town in the South really comes through. And I think that's something she's trying to do.

22:38Jeff:A lot of the descriptions online of the book call it a Southern Gothic, which I don't think is correct, but it has Gothic elements. Yeah, you're right. It's not quite right. Yeah, the people are weird of it is there. So the book is, as you said, like, there's not one straight through plot line. But it is set the summer that Scout is eight years old. Her name is Jean Louise Finch. Scout is her nickname. As we said, her father Atticus, respected lawyer in this fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama. And he's defending Tom Robinson, who's a black man accused of raping a white woman. And she's telling this from her adult perspective and filling in the details of life in this small southern town.

23:17Jeff:It's set in the mid 1930s. So we're in the middle of the Depression. Scout is telling us, like, as she goes to school and she's observing the other kids, we're seeing what poverty looks like in this town. We're seeing that some of the folks that Atticus represents can't pay him, but they leave food or they leave firewood or there's kind of a bartering and mutual aid system that's in place. members of the community are taking care of each other. And Scout is relaying to us the moral instruction that her father tries to instill in her and in Jim. It's this ethos grounded in like the dignity of all people, which would have been really radical in the 1930s.

23:56Jeff:Like Atticus Finch would not read as a 2025 anti-racist, but he was an anti-racist in 1935. Like a profound humanism is, I think, the best way. It's sort of, we say AGI, Advanced General Intelligence for Computers. This is Advanced General Integrity that Attica Finch is deploying across the board. Yeah. And before we find out about any of the stuff going on with Tom Robinson, we spend a large chunk of the book just in the summer. Dill is the friend who comes in from out of town. He's only there in the summers. and Dil Scout and Jem are obsessed with this house. Like this is really the gothic element, this house down the street that the Radley family has lived in.

24:38Jeff:It's been basically shut up for decades. There are all of these rumors about the family and one of the sons who's now an adult whose nickname is Boo never comes out. Like the rumor is that he stabbed his mother. Some crazy thing has gone down in their house. No one ever sees him and it's their mission, these little kids to try to get a glimpse of him. They're like peeking through the windows. They're dropping notes on fishing line, trying to get in. They're like creeping through the garden. Slapping the door and running away and daring each other to do stuff. On their walk to school one day, they notice that something is left in the knot of this old tree.

25:15Jeff:And they eventually figure out that he is leaving gifts. That's so charming. That little mystery element to that is so charming. I'd forgotten how fun, like, because there's a sort of dramatic irony, don't you think where I think the reader is supposed to get what's happening before the kids do but maybe that's just you know having read it before that whole plot line kind of reminds me of the um old man next door in home alone I was having the same well I was gonna ask you this I had that same thought but did you have a house in your neighborhood that you're like everyone's like what the hell's going on with that doesn't everybody does what is the deal with that house or there's some weird rumor I don't know if kids still have this because they of the internet to do this kind of thing but like there was definitely a house where we had heard slash made up weird rumors about what was going on there like jem says like oh he could have died and his dad stuffed him up in the chimney and he says that out loud and the adult's like why like this is a normal thing to propose what are you talking that's the i mean and it's not that the jem it's interesting one thing i didn't think about i didn't realize when i was a younger person, that part of this is Scout watching Jem grow up and realizing that Jem is different than she is and has a different way of interacting with the world.

26:24But he's enough older where she has multiple sort of moral compasses to orient herself based on how old they are and how related they're to the community. Because Atticus is obviously the load store, but Jem's emergent sensibility is important to her too, as is their maid slash housekeeper, Capernia's worldview in ethics and morality in the black church that she's, and then there's like the people of town. There's always the people of town sensibility that we have to get, which is usually superficial and close-minded and just mannered without having real substance to it. But that was something that struck me too is how much she is really navigating the value systems and sort of picking some from all of it and trying to decide what to take onto her own.

27:13because I think a common reading is you're just supposed to be Atticus, but I think there's actually something else emergent. I think the idea is going beyond Atticus is something that Scout and Jem want to do, even if they can't articulate it that way.

27:28Jeff:Yeah, I think the thing that they're really learning from Atticus is the value of pushing against conventionality. And there's a lot about gender on the page that I was surprised to run into. That doesn't get played very often in our memory of it. Yeah, there's really like direct definitions of what it is to be a gentleman or at least what Atticus is understanding of to be a gentleman is. And it's different than what a lot of the men in town are doing. You know, he's not showing up at the courthouse with his gun. He's trying to solve things with words. Jem is right on that cusp of puberty and is trying to figure out how to be a man and like to separate himself from his kid sister.

28:05Jeff:and Scout is surrounded by these older women, her aunt who comes to stay with them, the women from the town who are telling her that she needs to grow up and be a lady. And she's looking at them like, if this is what it is to be a woman, I don't want any part of that. I don't want to be that kind of lady. I want to go to school and actually learn things. You know, there's all of this stuff is made where she goes to school and the teacher is mad that she knows how to read already because it's going to interrupt the teacher's plans for instruction. and the teacher tells her to stop learning at home.

28:36Jeff:And so from her very first interactions with like public education and these sort of public institutions is learning that the way they do things at home is different than what public convention tells you. And sort of this value of making your own decisions about how to show up in the world is I think that's the big thing that Atticus is trying to instill in them. And we see Jim and Scout both figuring that out for themselves. And Atticus is unafraid. He's afraid, but he is willing to hazard his own life and by extension, his kids' lives. And there's a couple of moments where he realized he's gotten out over his skis into territory where it's genuinely dangerous.

29:16But what you do not see him do is back away. And that's something that that scout really much takes to heart. And as you say here, like one of the things that's so hard to remember now is what was going on in America at the time. Like these are the, we're pre-assassination civil rights movement in 1960, 61. I can only imagine what it felt like if these were issues that you cared about and you were part of this movement. This novel comes out, you know, we're getting protest marches, things are changing. You know, Kennedy's getting ready to be elected. Like I think that's one of the things I wish I could, I can know my history, but you can never know what it felt like to be there.

29:56And this is one moment I was thinking about again, like it must have felt amazing. I mean, it must have felt amazing. It must have felt amazing.

30:06Jeff:Yeah, there's this tension in the world in the 1960s that I think is a flavor of tension we're familiar with today, right now, that there is an occasionally violent conversation about rights and freedom and what it means to be free and who gets rights and what those rights are. and that Lee publishes this story into that environment, but set in the past. And her readership is going to be predominantly white. This is a book written to white people. I believe she is trying to talk to white people about how to understand their role and participation in systems and institutions that are racist. And she's doing it through this story and these very relatable characters rather than, you know, like a big nonfiction instructive text.

30:56Jeff:But I think it's intended to be both welcoming and challenging. The writing is so charming. The characters are relatable. There's clear affection for the small town. Like she's writing this while she lives in New York, but there's no East Coast eliteness about this. There's real love and care. And there's not a lot of interviews with Harper Lee. There's not a lot of commentary. about what was going on. So we can only guess that what she was trying, that that's intentional, that what she's trying to do in setting the book where and when she sets it and writing it the way that she does is draw more people into this conversation.

31:35Jeff:Like, yeah, it feels dated because we understood race differently. Well, it's 100 years ago. Yeah, in 1960 than we did it. But she's writing about the 30s, like the setting is 100 years ago. Right, and one thing that I've said for a long time on the Book Riot podcast, when a book hasn't aged well is that this is a good thing. It is a good thing that society moves beyond the point where a certain thing was radical. So it doesn't have radical ideas in it for today, but these were radical for 1935 and we're still pushing people in 1960. Yeah. She hasn't said much about it, Harper Lee, but one bit I did find is she said she wanted to be the Jane Austen of the South.

32:17And I was thinking about that and I know Pride and Prejudice being one of your favorite books, you'll really resonate with this, is how Austen captured the manners and morals of the day, but on top of it, underneath it, around it, was a more than wry critique of how those things happened. Much more of a critical consciousness in this book than in something like Pride and Prejudice, but there's this element of especially women's, lives are important and it's worth capturing what's going on here. To this degree, Harper Lee said, it's worth capturing what's going on in this small town, Macom, which isn't even like the biggest town in the county or something.

32:59She goes out of the way to say, it's been about the same size forever. Not a lot happens, but there's something important to be captured here. And it is this side of drama and this side of meaning and is as likely to produce a hero and a villain and interest as anywhere else. So I think that is a piece that when people read in high school and they don't touch it for 30 years like I have. And this is one thing that says, thinking of it as a slice of life for this place and this time is important. It's historical. It was historical fiction in 1961. It's a great point. So that's important to remember too.

33:30And I think it makes it, you can read it with a different sensibility than this is a book about American race relations. Like reading it through that lens is not, it's not as current. It doesn't feel alive in that way, though less alive, more alive than maybe it should in some places. but if you look at the larger project, I think it can feel alive, like much historical fiction can feel alive there too. You want to talk about book banning?

33:58Jeff:Yeah, I mean, this has been one of the most frequently banned and challenged novels basically since it came out, but especially in the last 20 years. And what makes it relatively unique among frequently challenged things is that the criticism comes from all the sides. There are white parents who don't want their kids reading this because it makes them feel bad about themselves. There are parents that don't want their kids exposed to the idea of rape that's in the book. And there are like some relatively descriptive conversations about it in the courtroom scene. And the book does use the N-word, which is historically accurate for the 1930s, where the book is set.

34:35Jeff:And there are folks who object to the use of that in the classroom, on all sides of the conversation. And, you know, It does read very loaded today, and the characters have conversations about whether or not this is an okay word to use. But Atticus's reasoning that they shouldn't use it doesn't stand up to 2025 readings. He's like, that's a common thing to say. It's not about the fundamental dignity of Black people or the impact that it would have on who you're saying it to. It's about what it says about the person saying it. So there is a real shift. And again, like society has grown and changed in the way that that's come that we've that we talk about it, that we understand that but it has been challenged from all sides.

35:18Jeff:Harper Lee and her publishers rejected, repeated and sustained requests for a version of the book without the offensive language. There has never been one. And, you know, maybe despite or because of that halo of things, you know, it won the Pulitzer in 1961. It's consistently been voted American readers favorite book of all time, been featured all over the place. And I think we will continue to talk about it. Younger readers, younger readers than us, I would I would guess Gen Z readers and like, you know, your kids and Gen Alpha probably aren't going to have the same experience. I wonder if they're going to read it.

35:54Jeff:Right. Right. And honestly, like, this is one of the big conversations about To Kill a Mockingbird now is like, why are we teaching this as the anti-racist novel when there are much more contemporary things? There's, you could grab Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give and have a much more current conversation. And that's just one example. And I think that's a great question. Like, there are things to recommend about this book. Yeah, I think it's more of an open question than than yes or no or this or that. But school curricula is limited. Like you can only put so many books on it. And I don't think that this is the best option for illustrating the kinds of points or inviting students to do the kinds of thinking that we want them to, that originally you wanted them to do is to kill a mockingbird.

36:41Jeff:There are other contemporary novels that can do it. But coming away from this reading, I also didn't, my elbows don't feel as sharp about like, well, why are we still talking about Harper Lee? which there's the book and then there's the discourse about the book. And in a lot of ways, the discourse has exceeded the book itself. As a paragon of moral instruction, I think, especially around race, gender, class, especially we can talk about that a little bit more. You probably should just like read regular sociology, honestly. But as a literary document, as a historical document, as a way into talking about American historical concerns, I think there's quite a bit to recommend it.

37:18I think you can kill multiple mockingbirds with one novel here in terms of thinking about American history, literary history, what language and writing could do in storytelling. So maybe some of the less political stuff, but you can do still the art and history stuff quite well. And maybe reframing in that way could be useful. I'm not going to take up a banner for or against the book in any given context. But I think either a complete rejection or a wholesale assumption of it as a paragon for something, neither of those I'm particularly interested in advocating for.

37:51Jeff:Well, I think a lot of the conversations about this book that happen online are occurring between people who haven't read the book in 20 years or longer. Which is usually what happens when people are arguing about books like this. That's happened. Let's talk about Harper Lee. Yeah. Harper Lee. So she's born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, which is a small town, a lot like Maycomb. She was, as I said, 34 when the book came out. And she was close childhood friends with Truman Capote, who it was later rumored wrote the book. And then that was And who is Dill, by the way. The character Dill is Truman Capote, who's like, kind of steals every scene Dill is in.

38:27Jeff:Dill's a good hang, quite a character. she grew up she left town she attended a small college and then she studied law at the university of alabama before she moved to new york she wrote stories all through college and into her adult life and then in 1957 she and capote are still friends and he introduced her to a literary agent who got her the book deal for the manuscript that became to kill a mockingbird it was pretty immediately a hit as you said it was featured by book of the month it was conditioned condensed for an edition for Reader's Digest. Unlike a lot of the books we're going to talk about on this show, it has never been out of print.

39:04Jeff:There's been an estimated 40 million copies sold worldwide, and that is rarefied air. It's 10 million more than The Great Gatsby and Gone with the Wind are estimated to have sold, and just 10 million less than Lolita and 100 Years of Solitude, just as an example and to give you some grounding in the constellation. And as recently as 2008, eight. It was the most read book in American high schools. 40 million copies. So we're looking at 65 years, right? So three quarters of a million copies per year. I wonder what the shape of that is. Maybe we'll have to get, maybe I can ask my little birdie at Serkana to help me.

39:43How many new copies of To Kill a Mockingbird selling in a week right now?

39:47Jeff:Oh, that's a great question. And it made me think about the fact that Gatsby is consistently Scribner's number one selling book of the year. And this has sold more books over time than Gatsby has. So it's moved around inside Harper. But I wonder, whichever Harper imprint it happens to be with at the time, is it that imprint's best book of you? Yeah, because it was originally published by Lippincott, which was bought by Harper, which was something else later. So I don't, do you think Lippincott probably got a premium because they had this in their stable? Maybe that's like, this was someone's exit plan it's like probably this is a good like aqua hire basically cash cow um to go here yeah and then uh at the top of the show we talked about how this was voted the best novel um in pbs's great american read which was in 2018 outlander was number two the very first harry potter novel was number three and pride and prejudice followed so these are americans favorite books but not necessarily written by american authors in that vote in 2018 the highest rated book by an author of color on that list was the color purple and it came in at number 27.

40:49Jeff:So that I think is perhaps an illustration of why we still need books like this. But 2018 is a very different cultural moment from 2020. And then from where we are now in 2025, I would be very surprised if the list was, it would still be heavily white. I'd be surprised if it was quite as white. And I would be surprised to see To Kill a Mockingbird still coming. Do you think Pride and Prejudice wins now? if that's if that's I mean the Harry Potter stuff has all kinds of things going on with it I think that would affect it's a great outlander feels like that was more of a that was of the moment but pride and prejudice if anything is only grown in esteem there have been multiple you know there's going to be another we're having a big Jane Austen romance 250th this year I'd be very curious one this is an under talked about thing that any year that you do a big vote like this depends on not just what people have had a long time affection for, but for what old books are currently in the zeitgeist because of something.

41:44Jeff:So it could be Great Gatsby this year because it's been the 100th anniversary and people have been reminded. Yeah, it's hard to think of a contemporary book that would even be in contention. So it'd probably be a reshuffling of the high school plus syllabus stuff. I mean, I think in a lot of college curriculum, in some high school, their eyes were watching God has replaced To Kill a Mockingbird and some others. and there are pros and cons to that. That also is historical fiction. I mean, it wasn't at the time. Well, Hurston's a tricky one when it comes to what's fiction, what's folklore. You can go back and listen to the episode about that.

42:17Yeah, go listen to the episode. But maybe it's time for a book riot poll and we just take the guardrails off and see what happens at this point. Never has been, I have never been one to count my first year of favorite books, Rebecca. And I read it early, then I had to read it again. I remember liking it, but moving on pretty quickly to stuff I like better. How is it ranked for you and what was your own first reading?

42:43Jeff:Yeah, I never had a big attachment to it either. I first read it in seventh grade. The courtroom stuff and the trial of Tom Robinson, I thought, took up a much bigger chunk of the book than it actually does. So when I started reading and I was like 150 pages in and we still weren't in court, what's happening? When is this? How did this? Your memory just become? My primary memory is that I had no idea what the hell a shiffer robe was. And no one explained that to us in seventh grade in Kansas. So that was confusing. And then I reread it in college in the early 2000s when I was writing a paper that compared the courtroom scene in To Kill a Mockingbird to a big courtroom scene that is the climax of the movie Pleasantville.

43:29Jeff:Yeah. But it's been I haven't read it really in my adult life. And I probably would never have gone back to reread it if not for this show. Yeah, I don't think I would have either. I felt like I kind of knew the deal with To Kill a Mockingbird, which is sort of true, but mostly not true. At the time, as you say here, I was doing this recently, the original views were sort of mixed, largely positive. I think it's hard to realize then at what a lightning rod it was for political discourse, where now it does read as historical fiction, Whereas then I felt more current because the civil rights movement was underway and very much up for debate.

44:13Yeah.

44:14Jeff:And the folks trying to ban books are still trying to ban To Kill a Mockingbird. They are still trying to ban The Mockingbird. Time magazine said it was an account of an awakening to good and evil. The New York Times review called it a level-headed plea for interracial understanding. But then The Atlantic was less glowing. They said it was sugar water served with humor, pleasant, undemanding. reading. Yeah. And, you know, one thing that's happened over the last 10 to, well, I mean, going back to the 60s itself, but where to get instruction about race relations in America, and largely we have moved more to like, let black people speak about black people.

44:53Yes. In this regard, I will say there's something to be said for watching, reading thinking about a white person navigating racial politics at the same time like there is a place for that now should it be at the center probably not but if racism is going to be dismantled you know a lot of that work is gonna have to be done by white people the perpetrators of and one thing that this book is putting on display is how that might happen right spoiler here. Tom Robinson is convicted. All 12 jurors convict him. But meaningfully, interestingly, there is one person, and we're given to believe that for the first time, because Atticus is sort of Superman of law and order, but also because there's one person, and it's presented in a specific way, and maybe, just maybe Tom Robinson would be acquitted.

45:48It might be beyond a reasonable, it might be there might be a reasonable doubt and so it's presented as like how change can happen and add is saying like well i want you to see you have to see this way everyone's like get the kids out of the courtroom but it's meaningful that we're in the position of the kids watching this travesty play out and thinking about how the jury is selected how this comes to pass where is that why didn't you call why do they get to do this like it's very very bureaucratic and logistical about how he gets convicted. And I think that is important to see. Yeah, I think that really matters.

46:23Jeff:Like to read it today, you really have to work to separate the book from the discourse. Like I found the book to be charming and funny and poignant. Like Scout's innocence is a little hard to relate to from here in 2025. But she's eight. Yeah, but eight-year-olds like seem a little different today, a little more worldly. And so there are moments that, you know, strain credulity. But the discourse is more about how society has or hasn't changed and what that means for this book's place in the classroom and in the canon. Is this the best way to introduce students in 2025 to a conversation about racism?

46:59Jeff:Where's the line between drawing white people into the work of anti-racism and the importance of white people talking to other white people about racism? And then over the line to elevating people into the position of white saviors. This becoming the definitive book about American racism. Right. And I can understand that critique, certainly. That like Atticus Finch as the hero of American anti-racism is problematic. Like, what does it mean that we give this book or that we have historically given this book by a white author primacy when many black authors have been addressing the same ideas and have been doing it more recently?

47:37Jeff:But there are still generations of readers holding on to To Kill a Mockingbird. Like readers on the left have largely migrated away from this book in recent years. It put some distance between themselves. But it's the message is still potent. And like as early or as recently as like last week, there were right wingers on social media, like losing their minds in viral tweets, calling this book a blood libel on the South. So like it still rings a bell. I know I was talking to a friend who's a historian and she was like, have you seen that the right is like they're still mad about To Kill a Mockingbird?

48:10Jeff:and they're mad about it all over again. I mean, they're still mad about the Civil War, so I guess it's not a surprise they're still mad about the Civil Mockingbird. Interesting, 1861, when I won the Pulitzer Prize, that's 100 years after the beginning of the Civil War. 1961. 1961, pardon me. You know, something that struck me this time, and I have this to ask you, something I did not clock at all in high school and got me a little squirmy is Atticus's cross-examination of Mabel on the stand about whether or not she was raped in a post-MeToo environment. I was like, huh, this is pretty, you know, in the believe women sort of like, it's more fraught.

48:51It's more fraught than I was expecting to walk into.

48:53Jeff:I didn't think about that because it's set up for us like so clearly going into that scene that Tom is innocent. Yeah. That I was reading the scene for like, what is Atticus going to do here to get her to, you know, show that she is lying. And then of course, Tom stands up and one of his arms is severely malformed. It's clear that he could not have like done the beating and the physicality of the things that she says happened to her. So I didn't read it through the I did not read it through the Me Too lens at all, because it's not about doubting whether she was raped he believed like something happened to her someone did beat her but it's he's trying to get to the truth of who did this to you and that it was her father beating her because she came on to tom robinson and he tries to like he tries to get out of it because this is an uncomfortable position but he's in an impossible position as a black man that a white woman is coming on to and he can't fight against her he's not going to hit her but if he runs, he looks guilty.

50:02Jeff:And so he is there when Mabel's father sees that they're touching, but Mabel is the one who initiated it and her father attacks her. Yeah. The book doesn't leave any doubt about what actually happened, but in the early stage of his cross-examination, he does some of the things that you, why didn't you go to the doctor right away? Yeah. You know, why didn't you tell any, I mean, these are things that are used to doubt, like sexual assault crime i mean i don't need to tell anyone here but there was a couple of questions like ah that reads a little bit differently now if it hadn't been set up for pages and pages in advance that like that we should expect that she was lying um about the whole thing and that it was a setup on tom robinson to get someone off the hook like you go into that scene knowing that tom robinson is a scapegoat so who are they covering for right yeah is the real question.

50:53Yeah. And again, it's not a major point, but I did have, it was an intrusive thought. I don't have our intrusive thought. I had an intrusive thought of

51:01Jeff:like, huh, this is a little - Yeah, I think she would write that differently today. You might write that a little bit differently at this particular point, but that was just sort of a side piece. Okay. Is it for you, Rebecca? Maybe if you haven't read it at all, or it's been 40 years, who might be the kind of person that might be especially enjoy or get something out of picking it up again. I think it's worth picking it up or going back to it. If you want to know what the big deal is, read it through your adult eyes and form an opinion on a book that launched a thousand hot takes. Like my perspective on the discourse about this book is really different having just read it.

51:39Jeff:And that's, that's valuable. Yeah. And you have a couple of good, maybe not similar. Like if reading the N word a bunch is really uncomfortable, you're going to get a lot of that deployed in very casual way, which can be more disturbing or differently disturbing than used as an epithet. And again, if you have a difficult time putting to the side momentarily, sort of contemporary understandings, readings, interpretations and practices, you're going to be uncomfortable for a lot of the book. I would encourage people to do their best when encountering any book from some period that, that has ideas they do not exactly agree with all the time right then.

52:17to sort of keep in suspension. A suspension of disbelief, but maybe a suspension of judgment for a little while as well can be helpful. I do think if you like storytelling and writing, there's a lot to be gained from this. We'll get to the well-read score in a minute, but like knowing, having a real take on To Kill a Mockingbird is a rare thing. Like a genuine understanding and reaction that's authentic and not parroting something else or a CliffsNotes version of online discourse can be very helpful. All right, Immortal Question Art asks, here are the ones that we try to figure out. What is the good life?

52:56What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else there might be? And what's the deal with good and evil, Rebecca? What are the ones you think here?

53:08Jeff:We're doing a lot of these. We're really doing what do I owe my neighbor? I think that's the primary one, I would say, right? For sure. yeah and also what's the deal with good and evil is on the page a little bit how and why do people do bad things you know when you see 12 white jurors line up behind the worst of them like maybell's father is a bad dude and the the and he's shameful and like the townspeople don't like him it's not like he's a respected figure um but they will that they will line up behind the very worst of them rather than convict him. They will convict a black man who was innocent.

53:50Jeff:Scout is doing a lot of learning here about how and why people do evil things. Yeah. How do I know what I know? There's quite a bit about subjectivity here. People hear what they want to hear and they see what they want to see. Atticus talks to that about how... I mean, Jem and Scout are outraged, right? How can Tom have been convicted? How does everyone not see what I see. And there's a lot about subjectivity. There's a lot in this book about the kids realizing that what they thought about Boo Radley or this person who was kind of mean to them, but is actually dying and she's going into drug withdrawal because you want to die, not a morphine addict.

54:26I had completely forgotten that subplot. There's a bit of a Mark Twain-esque episodic element where you kind of forget some of these smaller pieces that go into the larger tapestry.

54:37Jeff:Yeah. And there's a lot of instruction about empathy on the page too, about trying to imagine what someone else's life is like before you try to draw judgments about them. Yeah. So I think it's about a few of those things, but it's not about, it's not epistemological of that. It's not about the good. Maybe there's a, I mean, Atticus Fitch as a moral figure, but not necessarily like what's a good life. He comes home, he's single, he's sort of ostracized by the community. He just reads the paper. Yeah. It's like, what is the good life in the Aristotelian sense of like, what is it to be a good person.

55:09Was it to be a good person? Yeah, that's very true. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing? I say probably less than we've encountered so far.

55:17Jeff:I agree. Scout is a reader. Dill is a storyteller. Weirdly, the thing that gets the most anti-shine is the fads in primary education in the 1930s. We get introduced to multiple systems that teachers bring in, and all the kids are like, okay, well, I guess we're going to go with this version today. Yeah, I think Harper Lee was a real board in school as a kid. Not great. Not having a great time as a precocious reader and wannabe writer. Rebecca, could you get most of the gist? Most of the gist is the line we're going for here from watching The Signal Agitation, which of course the Gregory Peck version.

55:52It's never been redone. Yeah.

55:54Jeff:You totally can. And Gregory Peck won an Oscar for this, largely on the back of this six and a half minute monologue that he gives as his closing argument in the courtroom scene. If you don't go back and watch the whole movie, it is worth watching that scene. That's an incredible performance. It's one of the great adaptations. It just is. Would this be watchable as a Muppet version where a human plays the main character? Subject matter makes it pretty tough, my friend. I did not do any thinking for this one about who the one human in the Muppet version should be. I mean, it almost has to be Scout.

56:27I think it's funnier if it's Atticus Finch and they just come in and it's like, I don't even know. Who's the most sort of... I'm trying to think if he would even get it. Do we have a Gregory Peck? Have we a Gregory Peck? I think the closest we've...

56:41Jeff:No, I mean, we know he can be too funny now, but like Clooney or Jon Hamm? Yeah. Yeah, interesting. I don't think we want... I don't think we want some of the words that come out of people's mouths to come out of like Fozzie the Bear's mouth. You could do a Muppet version that's like, oh my God, that's like just the kids and the Boo Radley stuff. That would be fun. Like Dill would be Fozzie Bear. What if Boo Radley is the only human? Then I will revive my Adam Driver suggestion from the Hamlet episode.

57:19Jeff:What if the answer to this is always Adam? I think it has to be Michael Shannon, who's like the creepiest, but also most enduring Southerner I can think of. Michael Shannon forever. Yeah. Trivia adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes, and more based on her life, Scout, Dill, Atticus as Lee's father. It's auto fiction here. Do I have this? Where did I put mine? I'll let you do yours. Oh, my favorite Harper Lee factoid is sometime in the late 1950s, I couldn't find the actual date. a bunch of her friends got together for Christmas and gave her a year's wages so that she could take off her job and just write and try to make as a writer which also there's a I have a mini one which is is there something you learned in the course of this that you'd watch a one-act play about I would watch Harper Lee and her coterie of people in New York in the 50s doing their thing anyway that's that's beyond that sounds like a good time what else did you find Rebecca there was this persistent conspiracy theory that Truman Capote actually wrote it that that endured for decades that he wrote it or that he made significant contributions to it.

58:21Jeff:And this was finally put to rest in 2006 when scholars surfaced a 1959 letter that Capote wrote to Lee telling her that he had read the book, he offers praise for it. He doesn't mention any involvement. And we are taking that as Harper Lee wrote this book herself. And then the adaptation was in 1962. That is a fast turnaround from the book getting published to the rights being sold and scripted and the movie filmed. Yeah, you don't get any faster. You really can't. And Peck did that six and a half minute closing argument in one take. I mean, you can see how it's possible, again, because of the day and time where it has a play like quality where you can keep it to a limited number of scenes.

59:02You use a real town, you get some cameras and you can go. But it is pretty surprising. I always like to remind myself and others that most books are collaborative efforts and there's extensive documentation about lee reworking the manuscript with her editor and this goes i mean come really full circle when we see go set a watchman which we were told was some kind of weird-ass sequel which was not it was an earlier draft that got reworked and things got moved around like this is not the work of a lone genius like people it can be both that she wrote it and that a lot of people were part of the process at the same time too a little light to moderate sexism going on with the capote wrote this but also some of it is the shakespearean it's like there just wasn't a lot of other work to compare it to because she just didn't write um she was out there alive she wasn't doing a pinching she'd come to like these writing competitions that happened every year and like students she would read she would listen to students write about her work and like was out and around still sporting one of the worst haircuts anyone's ever had but like she just wasn't writing.

1:00:06Yeah. Very strange. Let's see. I did some quotes here. Would you like to hear what the most popular Goodreads quote is?

1:00:13Jeff:Please tell me. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it. On the one hand, sure. On the other hand, isn't that like one of the most, like walk in someone else's shoes is like that's been around for a while? Yeah, it has. I am genuinely surprised that the Goodreads number one quote isn't, until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read, one does not love breathing. I think that was number two. I think that was number two. Yeah. I think because Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird broke containment outside of just the nerds, a reading relating quote isn't the first one.

1:00:49It is a more of a, you could put this on a pillow, live, laugh, love situation there. Let's see. Where else do I want to go? Yeah. Yeah. people generally see what they look for and hear what they listen for. Again, subjectivity. But, you know, we didn't have Kahneman Tversky. You know, we weren't really thinking about subjectivity in those particular kinds of ways. I think that's interesting at the same time.

1:01:11Jeff:As a Southerner, I appreciated Lee's ability to depict the South. Like early in the book, we get, somehow it was hotter then. A black dog suffered on a summer's day. Bony mules hitched to Hoover carts, flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning ladies bathed before noon after their three o 'clock naps and by nightfall were like soft tea cakes with frostings of sweat and talcum just wonderful like if you have been in the south in the summer and ever thought oh my god how did they do this before air conditioning yeah you know it's um i was talking on the other pod the other day about I wouldn't mind.

1:01:55I know civility gets a bad rap and I'm not really talking about civility, but Atticus does represent a kind of advocacy for sure, putting himself on the line, but he does not demonize people that aren't him. And he says, they're certainly entitled to think that, you know, basically that's referring to anything that he doesn't agree with. And they're entitled to the full respect for their opinions. but before I can live with other folks, I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscious. The idea of your own conscious is not something we talk about very much.

1:02:33Like it's not a social media friendly idea of what is true for yourself within your interiority, not about your desire, but about your sense of morality, right? Like so much now is about scoring points or acquiring power. But thinking of being a person of conscious or a people of conscience, and we talk about bad faith arguments, and I think that sometimes is a way of talking about, this doesn't seem like an argument that comes out of individual belief or conscious, but about a will to be right, a desire to score a point, to acquire power, or get an agenda pushed towards me. But one thing I think that is always, there's only one thing that's more interesting to me than art making and creativity, and that is sacrifice.

1:03:16And any time you're thinking about doing something that serves your conscious, but not your physical, social, material well-being is always interesting. And Atticus Finch is a remarkable example of that.

1:03:31Jeff:Just earlier in that same passage you were quoting from, he's talking to the kids about how it matters, the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down. and that there's a couple mentions of just because you know you're licked before you start or in this case just because we were licked 100 years before we started because of the systems of racism in the south doesn't mean that we shouldn't try and that like he's doing something as you said he's putting his body on the line he is doing something Atticus Finch is like not just posting a thing on Instagram about how racism is bad he's actually doing something and I think especially for white people in our political environment today, the reminder of the value of doing that and of leveraging your privilege for something.

1:04:17Jeff:And of course, this is all the 2025 language for it. He doesn't talk about leveraging his privilege. But that is what he is doing. And there's a way to read it through modern eyes as a reminder of how to act today. Some of those Atticus moments of like, some people read it as nobility. And I think there's certainly nobility to it, but there's a different kind of commitment, a different kind of perseverance and endurance that I feel like there's something to grab onto and draw power from if you're open to it. So that leads into my first hot take, which Atticus Fitz really does rule. I think it's more complicated than he's just awesome.

1:04:52I think there's more complexity to when you start looking at the material conditions of how he actually lives and walks back into, and he doesn't take part in the society he serves in the state legislature and he he will he goes with calpurnia to tell betty rob their name betty i think i can't remember i think it's betty robinson tom rom like what happened like he is there like he takes the public defender case and he's seen as someone who will take up a lost cause and give it an effort and lost causes are only lost until

1:05:21Jeff:they're not yeah one of the things especially speaking of calpurnia they're made is this book made me think that elements of the bluest eye really feel like a response to to kill a mockingbird and like this comes out in 1960 and the bluest eye comes out in 1970 and tony morrison would have been aware yes of to kill a mockingbird certainly i couldn't find anything where she talked about it but like probably still an editor she was probably an editor at random house yeah but it's impossible to think that she wouldn't have this in her consciousness in some way and And the things that really stood out to me, especially since we're doing both of those books in this season of the show, Atticus tells the kids not to use the N-word, but it's in the context of not being common.

1:06:06Jeff:It's not about the impact of that word on Black people. You go to The Bluest Eye, and Morrison gives us a really deep look at the word's weight on just about every character, but especially the kids. How the kids use it, how they experience having it used on them. And then in To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout's mind is totally blown by the realization that Calpurnia lives a double life. And she uses the phrase a double life. Like she goes to church with Calpurnia and sees her interacting with people in a different way. She sees her code switching. And she asks, like, why are you talking black, basically?

1:06:39Jeff:Where Morrison gives us Polly, who is a character who is also a domestic worker. And we see Polly at home. And then we see Polly at work with the white kids that she's raising. and how she cares for them. And it was just, having just reread The Bluest Eye, it was impossible for me to - That's a really good connection. To like read the scenes with Calpurnia and these kids without thinking about Polly and without thinking about Calpurnia's experience of it. But Lee is not interested in that at all. Yeah, I mean, I think she is a little bit, she doesn't quite know, she doesn't dare to try to inhabit Calpurnia's sensibility, which is probably responsible.

1:07:17We do get a lot of Calpurnia, and Atticus gives a great defense of Calpurnia when his relatives are like, yeah, you can't let the kids listen to her. It's like, Calpurnian knows more than all of us. She's a part of our family. She doesn't work until she says he doesn't want to be here. And it's sort of a sense, that's the sort of, it's almost a noblesse oblige version of it. But, you know, seeing the church and seeing a different kind of connection and seeing the black community of Monroeville in some kind of a way, even if it's only as a interloper, is different than you get in, you know, you don't get that in Huck Finn.

1:07:52You just don't. That's a new thing under the sun for To Kill a Mockingbird. Let's see. You can go read, if you want to do other things like this, there's kind of not a lot. I couldn't think of a lot of direct comps. Like if you want this, but for a different place in time, I had a hard time with that.

1:08:06Jeff:Yeah, it is kind of singular in that way. I mean, if you want to see the book's origins, you can read Ghosts at a Watchman, which was published, what, about 10 years ago now? Eight or 10 years ago. And it is an early draft of the book. despite the fact that they called it a new novel by Harper Lee at the time, which I will be bitter about forever. Yes, you will. Tell us what the thing is. Treat me like an adult and tell me what the scam is. But you could pick up Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. It's a nonfiction book. He's a lawyer who represents poor people in the South, many of whom were wrongfully convicted.

1:08:37Jeff:And one of the main stories that he tells is about a man from Lee's real-life hometown, Monroeville, Alabama, who was put on death row after a sham trial in front of an all-white jury. so if you want to go more in the like real life anti-racism education you could go there and then mary mcdonough murphy has a book of essays and criticism that came out when this uh when to kill a mockingbird was turning 50 called scout atticus and boo that i've also seen good reviews of i haven't had a chance to read that myself i mean if you want to see i guess in terms of um a similar kind like thinly veiled auto fiction from a writer of this era talking about being a kid in the south james baldwin's go tell it on the mountain would be a go it's not stylistic but like if you want a black author telling a story about being a kid growing up in a complicated situation a complicated time well maybe it's not that complicated fraught it may be not that complicated was it was fraught you know that would be an interesting twin i don't think i've ever considered them together and what I like that pairing they're doing at the same time I forgot one of my hot takes tell me Lee is really struggling to figure out class yeah Scout is really trying to figure out inheritance class divisions society Atticus if there may be a simple there may be a clear and maybe some naiveness or overly simple I don't know relation about racism how to figure out how to deal with class is not something it's there and it's present like we get poor people and they can be a caricature i think but also atticus and the rest of them become sympathetic to boo who is this outcast and strange person and poor and has some sort of divergence from the main in men in multiple ways there is sympathy to be offered but not much understanding.

1:10:38And I'm sure there's interesting critical work on especially poor white people and racial segregation and class hierarchies. But that is not something an Atticus ever deals with directly. That's not a lesson that's imparted directly to the reader by Atticus and Scout. So that's something that I thought was interesting this time too.

1:10:56Jeff:Yeah, the gaps in Atticus's parenting through a 2025 lens are interesting, like also a moment where somebody talks about a child being mixed and Scout is like, what is a mixed child? And I like one of my notes on the page was like, okay, Atticus is missing some points here. Yeah. And then, but that character gets a moment because they think he's a drunk, but he's performing drunkness. We can live the life he wants to live. Like that's very fascinating. Um, and something that certainly my teachers didn't tell me when I was in the 11th grade is like, let's dwell on this person pretending to be drunk so he can do something legal and not be an outcast for it.

1:11:34Very strange. Cocktail party crib sheet. Lee wanted to be Austin of the South. I think that's an easy one to remember. This is a novel of manners and morals. It's also about the big things, but also manners and morals. Too hard to remember the phenomenon, right? We're left with the echo of the phenomenon, but what a phenomenon it was. Lee is underrated. As a writer of sentences, The discourse around this has overshadowed what she could do and what we didn't get. Like, we didn't get 40, 50 years of Lee doing this stuff. I wonder what the reputation would be if, like Pynchon, she had seven or eight more novels.

1:12:14I don't know. I mean, it's impossible to know. Would she win the Nobel Prize in 1980? I think that's entirely possible.

1:12:20Jeff:Or is this the best book and the rest of them don't stack up? Well, she says at one point, I read what I had to say and I didn't want to do anything else. Is that a clever rejoinder to why you didn't write anything else? Or is that the truth? I think both of them are interesting. And as you said before, the gender dynamics and what especially Atticus Finch is doing with Scout in 1935 is maybe more radical than some of the racial dynamic stuff because it's not on display in the same way. And there's a lot of, you know, like older women on the page that are telling Scout she needs to be girly, basically.

1:12:56Jeff:But there are also plenty older women who are pushing against things. Like there's a wonderful description of Miss Maudie who's like allergic to being inside her house and she gardens all day and her big straw hat. And then come evening, she's like holding court on the porch. There's Mrs. DuBose who like she dies. The kids have hung out with her right before she dies. and Atticus tells them that she was conscious to the last almost, conscious and cantankerous. And like, put that on my headstone, please. Yeah, that's goals. Maybe we need a category here for like, what's my tattoo from this book?

1:13:26Jeff:I like that. Yeah, yeah, that's a good one. What would we tattoo on a Muppet? What would we tattoo on a Muppet would be a nice category. That's a bridge too far. All right, let's do zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10, with 10 being the highest. We have five categories, historical importance, readability current relevance of central questions book nerd read credit oh damn factor interesting one Rebecca historical importance is really tough here because this is such a like classic of American fiction but also it doesn't change anything about American fiction it feels like a one-of-one which is hard to deal with yeah it's not like the start of a whole new stylistic thing or the start of a sub genre.

1:14:09Jeff:I don't know, like a four? Well, but also it was, it's the people's favorite book. Like for a half a century, like that matters. Like to understand that book in the, I would go eight just because of that element. And it was a huge phenomenon. Like when the, 40 million, like it did win the Pulitzer, but a lot of things have won the Pulitzer. But it did that and sold 40 million copies and has a landmark adaptation. and if you're saying Harper Lee, people know who that, they know the name to kill a mockingbird. Okay, don't Atticus Finch me here. We can give it an eight. Well, I mean, but I was thinking along the same lines.

1:14:44It sounds like, I think we're so, this is a case where we work in this industry that we've sometimes missed the forest for the trees.

1:14:52Jeff:I think that's a good point. Okay, that's a compelling point about that one. Readability, 10, nine? Yeah, it's super readable. Are we gonna have a more readable book than this? No, it's easy. If we're ever gonna give it 10, we have to give it here, I think. Differobe is a chest of drawers. That's all you need to know. It's a 10. 10. Current relevance of central questions. I mean, this is also tricky because racism ain't gone, but we don't talk about it in this way. It doesn't feel like you're going to get your hair blown back by like, oh, I understand American racism in a different way like you did then.

1:15:20On the other hand, the past isn't like, you know, Joyce said the past. No, is that Faulkner or Joyce? I can't remember. I get things confused. The past isn't gone. It's not even dead is very much present in that.

1:15:29Jeff:I mean, the questions are still central. Like the questions are a 10, but Lee's version of the questions is like a three or four. Yeah, yeah. Maybe we can split the difference of like a six or a five or something like that. Bookner-Reedcrate, also a fascinating one because this one I almost want to get a slash score to. Like almost none because most people, if most people have read a novel that's even close to literary fiction, they've read this. On the other hand, to have read it on purpose by yourself? After you graduated from high school. No, but I'm saying even if you were in high school and it wasn't as, like if you read it on your own, I'm giving you points for that.

1:16:09Jeff:Yeah, I think it, the points here are all for you read it outside of a classroom. Yeah. So like a one if you were assigned to read it, but if you're like, you know, I went back and read it and I always wanted to understand it. Like I'm giving you a seven. I'll give you a seven for doing the work. Sure. Oh, O'Dam factor. Also a tricky one. Yeah, this was tricky. I was surprised by how much I appreciated about the book on this reading. So there's an O'Dam element to like, this is better than I expected it to be based on what the discourse has been pumping out for the last several years. But it's not like stylistically incredible.

1:16:44No. The moment, like, I do think, I do think if I were to rate like 30 top 50 moments in American literature, stand up your father's passing is a peak. Like that is something else that there's another hundred pages I could maybe do without to be perfectly honest with you. I don't know, four, five, I think it's four. Yeah. Weird one, a very strange one to be presented with and try to reckon with something that's more of a monument than an alive... The idea of to kill a walking bird. Yeah, you're wrestling with that the whole way through. Last thoughts, anything else you want to say, Rebecca?

1:17:25Jeff:I'm really glad that I went back and read it. Yeah. Better than I remember. Yes. Better than I remember. And certainly more complicated and accomplished than the take industry. Right. Yeah, not the best of the books we're talking about this season. Not my favorite of the books we're talking about this season, but I am glad for an opportunity to go back and revisit it. And I think if you have any question about whether your memory of it from your educational reading of it is accurate or how you might relate to it today, it's worth going back. I think it would be fascinating to teach in like a college classroom with the discourse.

1:18:02I mean, it's almost more interesting because you have something to push against, like some sort of oversimplifications to read. Show notes are going to be at bookriot.com slash listen. You can shoot us an email, zerotowellreadatbookriot.com. Thanks again to Thrift Books for sponsoring this inaugural season of Zero to Well Read. If you have a spare moment, maybe while you're doing Halloween stuff, you're in the rain, you're watching TV or football, and you think about giving us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, we'd greatly appreciated that. And Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network.

1:18:37Rebecca, thank you so much. Sincron.'"