Andrew Newman, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)
An English professor takes a critical look at why today’s students are assigned the same books that were assigned decades ago – and why American school curricula are so difficult to change.
Recent reports of Black students in Ontario reveal an ongoing pattern of racism including a lack of adequate reading materials.
Wadi Lissa /Unsplash
To Kill a Mockingbird is no sermon. Its lessons are presented in effortless style, tackling the complexity of race issues with startling clarity and a strong sense of reality.
What justifies keeping some books out of the hands of young readers?
Sodanie Chea
Trisha Tucker, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
As Harry Potter turns 20, a scholar says protesters who try to censor books do not trust young readers to discern the difference between fantasy and reality. But why?
Atticus is not who we thought he was – but maybe who we thought he was was wrong.
Paul Walsh
Atticus Finch, we learn in Go Set a Watchman, once attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting, and welcomes pro-segregation speakers at local council meetings. But is he really so different to the man we know from To Kill a Mockingbird?
Despite receiving mixed reviews, Go Set a Watchman was the most pre-ordered book in publisher HarperCollins’ history.
Lucas Jackson/Reuters
By now there can be few people who don’t know Harper Lee’s supposedly long-lost manuscript, Go Set a Watchman, will be published in July. It will be the first book published by Lee since To Kill a Mockingbird…
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Harper Lee receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in 2007.
Larry Downing/Reuters
The announcement of the upcoming publication of Go Set a Watchman – a sequel to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird actually written before the famous novel – has, not surprisingly, set off a flurry of…
Lee’s second novel, Go Set a Watchman, will have a more adult centre of gravity.
Chris Burke
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide, and was voted The Greatest Novel of All Time in a London Daily Telegraph poll of 2008…