NYT story about the very private author here. Lee attends the annual awards ceremony for an essay contest on the subject of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” sponsored by the University of Alabama. Here is a brief excerpt:
… “Ms. Lee said she was struck by the perspective young people bring to the book. “They always see new things in it,” she added. “And the way they relate it to their lives now is really quite incredible.”
“The students write with longing for the kind of unmanaged childhood experienced by Jem and Scout Finch in the rural 1930’s Alabama of Ms. Lee’s rendering. Some tell of the racial tensions they witness in their school cafeterias, others of the regional prejudices they experience at the hands of Northern peers who assume anyone from Alabama must drive a pickup truck or live in a mobile home. In an essay a few years ago one girl likened the trial of the book’s Tom Robinson, a black man unjustly accused of raping a white girl, to the 1999 murder of Billy Jack Gaither, a young man living in Sylacauga, killed because he was gay.” …
It’s always nice to remind the anti-Southern bigoted so-called “liberals” that it could be Scout, or Jem, or Harper Lee herself that they are calling “cracker.”
