Screenshot: Aaron Sorkin and Jeff Daniels in Mockingbird publicity. YouTube. Fair use.
Harper Lee’s classic novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird”, set in Alabama in the mid 1930s, tells the story of a black man falsely accused of rape, and his defence in court by the saintly Atticus Finch, all narrated by Finch’s 8-year-old daughter, Scout (or Jean Louise, to use her baptismal name).
Written by Lee before she was even 30, and basing her characters on her own family, the book has been in print for nearly sixty years, has accumulated 30 million sales, and was memorably translated to the screen in 1962, winning Gregory Peck an Oscar for his performance as Atticus. Until just before her death, a year ago, Lee was thought to have written no other book, though a manuscript of a sequel about Atticus Finch twenty years later – of disputed provenance – was published under the title of “Go Set A Watchman” in 2017.
