To Kill a Mockingbird

There's been a lot of talk on the internet recently about Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird, especially whether or not she cooperated in an upcoming biography. She says she didn't. Whatever. What we do know is that the book, published in 1960, is still around, and for most people, still as powerful as ever. A new documentary, Hey, Boo: Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird, attests to that (check out the preview).

Adrienne Gaffney from Speakeasy interviewed filmmaker Mary Murphy and asked her why this particular book: "If you ask a person, they can tell you where they were and what was happening to them when they read 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' Wally Lamb can tell you the color of the lamp in his sister’s room, other people can tell you what the chair felt like when they stayed up all night reading. It’s seared into your memory and I think it has a lot of meaning for people at that age. What is unusual and makes this a phenomenon, I think, is that you can go back to something you loved as an adolescent and, in this case, you can not only love it again, you can find more and more and more to pull out of it. I think that is very rare."

Read the whole interview, The Real Story Behind To Kill a Mockingbird.