The 100 best novels
written in English
The 100 best novels
written in English
No 55
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
(1960)
Her second novel is finally arriving this summer, but Harper Lee’s first did enough alone to secure her lasting fame, and remains a truly popular classic
Robert McCrum
Monday 16 March 2015 05.45 GMT
E
arlier in this series, I excluded Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852) from this series on the grounds that, in the 19th century, much of its phenomenal popularity derived from its timely advocacy of abolition in the run-up to the American civil war. Similarly, To Kill a Mockingbird owed some of its success to extra-literary circumstances: it was published in the year JFK went to the White House, then caught the mood of the civil rights movement,sold tens of millions of copies, and inspired a movie classic starring Gregory Peck. But, where Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a simple tale with an explicit moral, intended to change hearts and minds, Harper Lee’s only published book to date is a complex and subtle work of literature that has inspired and influenced generations of schoolchildren in the US and, most especially, in the UK. It’s that rare thing: a truly popular classic.
Narrated by Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, at the outset the six-year-old tomboy daughter of widowed small-town lawyer Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird is ostensibly about race prejudice in the American south. At the core of its main plot is the trial of Tom Robinson, an African-American accused of raping a white girl. When Atticus Finch is instructed to conduct Robinson’s defence, his fortune-cookie declaration that “You never really understand a person until ... you climb inside his skin” becomes the rhetorical heart of a novel based on Nelle Harper Lee’s formative years in the Alabama of the 1930s. Scout’s coming of age, another major strand in the story, will involve her realisation that “Boo” Radley is a benign mystery in her life and that many childhood terrors have mature meaning.
For all Atticus Finch’s noble defence, Robinson is convicted by an all-white jury, condemned to death, and shot dead while attempting a jailbreak. The death of an innocent man is linked to the dominant metaphor expressed in the novel’s title. The mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos), a thrush-like bird with a long tail, creamy grey breast and white flashes, is a popular creature in American folklore. ForHarper Lee it is the quintessence of innocence and the goodness of the natural world. Mockingbirds, says one character, “don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird”.
A note on the text
To Kill a Mockingbird was published by JB Lippincott on 11 July 1960. It was initially titled Atticus but Lee renamed it to represent a novel that went far beyond a character study. Her editor at Lippincott warned Lee to anticipate a modest sale of a few thousand copies. She herself once said, “I never expected any sort of success”, and claimed that she was “hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers”. This is disingenuous. She also remarked that “at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. I hoped for a little, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.” Instead of a “quick and merciful death”, a Reader’s Digest reprint gave the novel an immediate audience, with sales eventually topping 40m worldwide (and counting). Despite her publisher’s warnings, the book soon brought acclaim to Lee in her hometown of Monroeville, and throughout Alabama.
Critical reactions varied. To The New Yorker it was “skilled, unpretentious and totally ingenious”. Time magazine declared that the novel “teaches the reader an astonishing number of useful truths about little girls and about Southern life”. Some reviewers lamented the use of poor white southerners, and one-dimensional black victims. The great southern writer, Flannery O’Connor, said: “I think for a child’s book it does all right. It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book. Somebody ought to say what it is.”
Within a year of its publication To Kill a Mockingbird had been translated into 10 languages. In the years since then it has been translated into more than 40, has never been out of print in hardcover or paperback, and has become part of the standard school curriculum. A 1991 survey by the Book of the Month Club found that To Kill a Mockingbird was rated behind only the Bible in books that are “most often cited as making a difference”. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writing in theGuardian, stated that Lee writes with “a fiercely progressive ink, in which there is nothing inevitable about racism and its very foundation is open to question”, and compared her to Faulkner, who wrote about racism as an inevitability.
Further books from Harper Lee
American literature has several examples of one-book writers who burned out fast. In 1946, for instance, Raintree County by Ross Lockridge Jr and Mister Roberts by Thomas Heggen both became bestsellers and got the Hollywood treatment. But then Lockridge and Heggen became hopelessly blocked. By the end of the 40s, both had committed suicide.
Until last month, Harper Lee was famous as the quintessential one-book author, often the subject, over many years, of wild rumours. One of the most bizarre was that her friend Truman Capote (whose In Cold Blood she helped research) was the true author of Mockingbird. More seriously, she claimed to be working on another novel “ever so slowly”, a manuscript entitled The Long Goodbye. But it remained unseen, and the rumours continued to ebb and flow.
But now we have a new rumour, and one that seems to be essentially true. There is, apparently, more to come at last. In February, HarperCollins announced the forthcoming publication of Go Set a Watchman, news which came with a quote from the 88-year-old Harper Lee in which she declared herself “humbled and amazed” that this book, revisiting some of her old characters, would see the light of day, 55 years after her first novel. Inevitably, there is controversy about the timing of this news. Harper Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Carter, is at the centre of the mystery surrounding the book, which is said to be in production with a first printing of 2m copies.
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)
003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)
011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
017 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
026 The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
027 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
028 New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
055 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)
073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)
078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
No comments:
Post a Comment