To Kill a Mockingbird, the movie

So, To Kill a Mockingbird.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying it’s one of my favorite books of all time. But amazingly, until last week, I had never seen the film. Now that that has been rectified, let’s talk about the movie.

As with “the Grapes of Wrath,” there were some key omissions in the film version: Calpernia is almost non-existent as a character, there is no visit to the all-black church where she and Tom Robinson’s family worship, there’s no uncle Jack, or Christmas at Finch’s Landing, there’s no house fire to give Boo Radley reason to cover a startled Scout with a blanket, no morphine rehab for Mrs. Dubose, and plenty of other edits that strip color and richness from the original. But while we may have lost some of the scope of Scout’s coming of age story on the cutting room floor, screenwriter Horton Foote still manages to hone in on the main drama of the court case, and the main theme of Innocence Lost. The angry mob is still shamed out of a lynching by Scout, Jem and Dill at the jail. We still get to see Atticus squeeze the trigger on the mad dog while the Sheriff soils his drawers. And there was still apparently enough of Atticus’s heroics and wisdom to nab a Best Actor nod for Gregory Peck.

All told the film won three Academy Awards (Peck for best actor, Horton Foote for best Adapted Screenplay, and it also won for Best Art Direction, in addition to being nominated in 5 other categories) and has gone down as one of the classics of American cinema. No doubt its appearance in 1962, just two years after the novel’s release and right in the throes of the Civil Rights Movement, was a huge factor in its lasting legacy and influence. It has come to epitomize the courtroom drama genre. (Plus, it gave us the film debut of Robert Duvall, who dyed his hair blond and stayed out of the sun for six weeks so he could play the reclusive bogeyman, Boo Radley.)

Is it a perfect adaptation? No, but it’s a darn, good flick, and it’s true to the heart of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-winning masterpiece. Check it out:

H.L. Mencken Steps In It

In 1917, H.L.  Mencken published an essay about what he saw as the abject, cultural wasteland of the American South, titled “The Sahara of the Bozart-” Bozart being a low-brow play on the term ‘beaux-arts.’ You can read the whole thing here. Now, there are a whole host of things one could say about his wacky racial theories (Anglo-Saxon blood is apparently best, Celtic blood the worst, with Blacks and Frenchmen somewhere in the middle), but I’ll just pick out a few choice lines from the essay to give you the gist of his argument:

“Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity.”

“There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac;”

“Once you have counted James Branch Cabell (a lingering survivor of the ancient regime: a scarlet dragon-fly imbedded in opaque amber) you will not find a single Southern prose writer who can actually write.”

“There is a state (Georgia) with more than half the area of Italy and more population than either Denmark or Norway, and yet in thirty years it has not produced a single idea.”

He sure doesn’t pull any punches. But one of the chief risks of being an arrogant, condescending blowhard, is the possibility that the object of your scorn might just turn around and prove you to be an idiot.

As it turned out, the timing of Mencken’s essay coincided with a Southern literary renaissance that would make any region of the world envious. Writers like William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, and Kathryn Anne Porter were already hard at work and would come to share 6 Pulitzers and a Nobel Prize between them. The “Fugitive” poets at Vanderbilt University were emerging at the same time. And this early group would inspire a follow-on generation of southern writers like Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Walker Percy, William Styron, Harper Lee, Truman Capote and John Kennedy Toole. (Not too shabby, South!)

But speaking of tools, Mencken was no dummy. Rather than claiming he had been wrong when reprinting his famous essay, he simply prefaced it with this audacious claim: “there is reason to believe that my attack had something to do with that revival of Southern letters which followed in the middle 1920 's.”

I’m  not buying it, but well-played Mr. Mencken. Well-played.

Georgia vs. Bama: The Lit Crit Catfight

Georgia fans might be a little bitter after losing to Alabama in the SEC Championship the other night, but let’s face it, this bad blood is nothing new. Even the world of literature has not been immune to the effects of this southern rivalry.

When Bama belle Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird  to great acclaim in 1960, Georgia girl Carson McCullers reportedly wrote the following to her cousin: "Well, honey, one thing we know is that she's been poaching on my literary preserves."  (Hiss! Reer!)

And another female Georgian author, Flannery O’Connor, tried a more subtle “bless her heart” back-handed compliment of Lee: "I think for a child's book it does all right. It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they're reading a child's book. Somebody ought to say what it is."

Apparently, hell hath no fury like a female southern gothic author scorned.

My life story- in ten authors or less

Like Wallace Thurman and Neal Cassady, I was born in Salt Lake City.

I went to the same high school as another Wallace, Wallace Stegner.  (and Roseanne Barr as a matter of fact. High School Musical was filmed there-yep, okay. I’ll stop.)

Like both Wallaces, I went on to the University of Utah. And like Thurman, I was a pre-med student while there.

Like Pearl Buck, I spent time abroad as a missionary.

Like Harper Lee I was once an airline reservations agent. Unlike Harper Lee, I didn’t have friends who funded a one-year sabbatical so that I could finally write my lasting literary masterpiece.

Which is why I’m a marketing slave in corporate America, which kind of makes be like Kurt Vonnegut, who worked as a PR man at GE before exploding onto the literary scene.

Like Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Mitchell, I now live in central Georgia. (But yikes, unlike  those illustrious southern belles, I hope to live past their average 46 year lifespan. Perhaps Erskine Caldwell, who was born just 20 miles away and lived to age 83, bodes a little better for me.)

What about you? Who shares your biography?

Literature and The Art of Manliness

If you liked our post from Fathers Day, you'll probably also enjoy these similar posts from one of my favorite sites, ArtofManliness.com.

Lessons in Manliness From Atticus Finch

Lessons in Manliness From The Old Man & The Sea

Lessons in Manliness From Beowulf

Be a Better Dad, Read a Novel...

Fathers Day’s got me thinking. There just aren’t many great fathers in the world of literature. Scan your bookshelves and tell me how many decent, loving fathers you come across. You’ll find that the dearth of dads is pretty striking. It seems we get better stories when our fathers are dead, cruel, or out of the picture altogether. Even when they’re there, they tend to be hapless milquetoasts (I’m looking at you, Tom Joad Sr.) There’s a lot more tension that way. And it lets the main character figure things out on their own.


But of those select few who can be held up as examples, I think you’d have to put To Kill A Mockingbird’s  Atticus Finch right at the top of the list. A quick perusal of that book can give some great pointers to those of us trying to figure out fatherhood. Channel Mr. Finch, and you’re well on your way.


For example, teach your kids to read. Teach them to respect their elders. Teach them all about life. But most of all, teach them by example. Don’t be afraid to take a principled stand. Sure, today’s casting directors will put Latinos, Asians, and wheelchair-bound Aborigines in just about every show they watch on tv, but nothing says ‘racism isn’t cool’ like defending a falsely-accused black man when the whole town is forming a lynch mob.


Treat your kids with fairness. Show them what integrity means. At the same time, respect their need to understand the rationale behind all your silly rules. 


Let your kids be kids. Let your girls be tomboys. Give them a long leash and let them explore the world around them.


But know when to give that leash a tug. (Hint, if they’re using a fishing pole to drop provocative messages into your neighbors’ back window, they’ve probably overstepped some important boundaries.)


Be humble. If you’re the deadest shot in Maycomb County you don’t have to go bragging about it. Just be ready to take care of business when mad dogs come to tear your kids to shreds. You never know when the Sheriff’s going to crap his pants under the pressure of a “one shot deal.”


I could go on and on. Is Atticus perfect? Definitely not. But where he has faults we can also learn from his mistakes. 


For instance, when the town lowlife swears revenge on you and your family, don’t just wipe his loogie of your face and say you’re too old to fight. Put the bastard out of commission, because sooner or later he’ll come after your kids, and unless they happen to don protective giant ham costumes made of chicken wire, or unless your reclusive neighbor can put a kitchen knife between his ribs, well, things probably won’t end well.


Oh, and maybe this was okay to do with old ladies during the Depression, but nowadays you probably shouldn’t lend your kids out to the neighborhood morphine addict to help wean him or her off their special sauce.


Anything I missed? Any other great fathers from land of literature? As a dad myself, I’d love to hear more…

Forget flouridation, Let's look at literary additives

We're all familiar with the monumental genius of Harper Lee's classic book To Kill a Mockingbird. It turns out that the character of Dill just happens to be based on a very good childhood friend of Lee's.

Apparently, the real Dill was a kid named Truman Streckfus Persons and, as the years passed, Persons became a rather accomplished novelist in his own right. After his mother remarried, he took on a name that’s probably more familiar to you: Truman Garcia Capote.

This leads us to ask the obvious question: What was in the water in Depression-era Monroeville, Alabama? (And whatever the answer is, can I please get some?)