Friday, June 12, 2015

Harper Lee Book Discussions

The library will hold a discussion of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird on Tuesday, June 30 at 7:00 PM. The discussion will be free and open to the public.

This will be the first of two Harper Lee programs. The library will also hold a discussion of Go Set a Watchman on Tuesday, July 28. Participants must secure their own copies of both books.

Published in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize and become one of the most beloved of American novels. Its nostalgic yet clear-eyed portrait of life in the Depression-era South; its engagement with issues of class and, especially, race; and its unforgettable characters, especially the young narrator, Scout, and her father, the noble Atticus Finch, have made this book a contemporary classic. Few books can match its iconic stature.

Harper Lee is now eighty-nine years old, and for decades, To Kill a Mockingbird was famously her only published fiction. Now a second novel, Go Set a Watchman, is scheduled for publication this summer. In this book, set some twenty years after the events of To Kill a Mockingbird, an adult Scout Finch travels from New York to Maycomb, Alabama to visit her father, Atticus.

The Haverhill Library Association is marking this literary milestone by scheduling discussions of both novels.