One day in September 1933, shortly after having been bailed out of jail, a middle-aged, partially paralyzed black man named Dennis Cross answered a knock at his front door in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His visitors, pretending to be police officers, were in fact white civilians, and they were incensed that Cross had been accused of sexually…
Justice. Truth. America! Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and producer Scott Rudin have triumphed in a lawsuit against the estate of Harper Lee. After a pair of lawsuits from the Lee estate accused Sorkin’s stage script of “To Kill A Mockingbird” of straying too far from Lee’s book, the Rudin camp has settled. Sorkin’s version will be…
Aaron Sorkin’s attempt to “Aaron Sorkin-ize” the classic novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” for Broadway is not going as planned. The New York Times reported Thursday that Harper Lee’s estate is suing Sorkin for deviating from the novel’s original plot. The New York Times reports: “In a complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in Alabama,…
Harper Lee tried to warn America. Twice. The first time she was redirected, politely, to take her nascent characters in a different direction. Lee accepted the editorial advice and produced “To Kill a Mockingbird,” an instant feel-good classic about how great white people can be to and for others. Central to this mythology is Atticus…
The publication of Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman,” the novel set decades after the era of her classic book “To Kill a Mockingbird,” has sparked a heated debate — and much heartache — over Atticus Finch. “Watchman” follows Finch 20 years beyond “Mockingbird” into the 1950s civil rights era. It exposes him to be…
Harper Lee passed away on February 19, at the age of 89. Alexandra Levine remembers the author’s Jewish lessons. “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published in 1960, and this week, 55 years later, the sequel comes out: “Go Set a Watchman.” The title is a biblical reference to Isaiah 21:6 — “For thus hath the…
Ruth Andrew Ellenson with her grandmother, Lillian Douglas Andrew, in Lynch Station, Virginia. When the news came this month that a manuscript by Harper Lee had been discovered and would be published in July, it was not without controversy, but I immediately called my 93-year-old grandmother, delighted to share the news. For us, and countless…
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