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A U G U S T 1 9 6 0
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
A review by Phoebe Adams
Two other novels have turned up which may be classified as respectable hammock
reading, if anybody reads in hammocks anymore. Walk Egypt by Vinnie Williams is
well-written soap opera, and Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird is sugar-water
served with humor. . . .
To Kill A Mockingbird is a more successful piece of work. It is frankly and
completely impossible, being told in the first person by a six-year-old girl
with the prose style of a well-educated adult. Miss Lee has, to be sure, made
an attempt to confine the information in the text to what Scout would actually
know, but it is no more than a casual gesture toward plausibility.
The book's setting is a small town in Alabama, and the action behind
Scout's tale is her father's determination, as a lawyer, liberal, and honest
man, to defend a Negro accused of raping a white girl. What happens is,
naturally, never seen directly by the narrator. The surface of the story is an
Alcottish filigree of games, mischief, squabbles with an older brother,
troubles at school, and the like. None of it is painful, for Scout and Jem are
happy children, brought up with angelic cleverness by their father and his old
Negro housekeeper. Nothing fazes them much or long. Even the new first-grade
teacher, a devotee of the "Dewey decimal system" who is outraged to discover
that Scout can already read and write, proves endurable in the long run.
A variety of adults, mostly eccentric in Scout's judgment, and a continual
bubble of incident make To Kill A Mockingbird pleasant, undemanding reading.
Copyright © 1960 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights
reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; August, 1960; Reader's Choice; Volume 206, No. 2;
pages 98-99.
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