Why ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Matters: What Harper Lee’s Book and America’s Iconic Film Mean to Us Today

The cultural impact of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, and its film adaptation two years later, is the subject of this clear-eyed appraisal of their enduring relevance. Paying meticulous attention to detail, Santopietro (The Sound of Music Story) crafts a compressed history of the book and film, beginning with Lee’s childhood in Monroeville, Ala., the inspiration for the novel’s town of Maycomb, and ending with the publication of Go Set a Watchman, the novel’s original and vastly different first draft, in 2015. Along the way he dispenses little-known facts culled from interviews and other secondary sources, such as the leading men initially considered to play Atticus Finch—Bing Crosby, Rock Hudson, and Spencer Tracy, among them—before the role landed with Gregory Peck for a career-defining performance. Santopietro shrewdly refers to the novel as “the right book in the right place at the right time” to resonate with a growing civil rights movement, and in later chapters relates its theme to recent racially charged incidents, including the violence that convulsed Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. Readers not familiar with the stories behind the novel and film will find much to relish. [em]Agent: Malaga Baldi, Baldi Agency. (June) [/em]