Michele Reutter

Mockingbird Grows Up

Although Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird has attracted a great deal of attention due to its engaging narrative and its messages about racial and social justice, the controversial "lost novel" Go Set a Watchman—published unexpectedly in 2015, a year before the author's death—provoked resistance from readers who loved the classic. In Mockingbird Grows Up: Re-Reading Harper Lee since Watchman, Cheli Reutter and Jonathan S. Cullick assemble a team of scholars to take on the task of reading, teaching, and contextualizing To Kill a Mockingbird in the wake of Go Set a Watchman. The essays contained in this groundbreaking volume cover a range of literary topics such as race, reading contexts, and American culture. Crucially, the volume revisits the question of African American characterization in Lee's work and reexamines the development of Atticus Finch, a character long viewed as an exemplar of justice and virtue in Lee's fiction. And perhaps most imperative, the editors take on questions regarding the provenance and publication of Go Set a Watchman. For this paperback edition, editors Reutter and Cullick have penned new introductory materials that further discuss the outsized reception of Go Set a Watchman, its effect on Harper Lee's legacy, and how revisiting Maycomb through either novel will never be the same. Literary scholars, educators, and those interested in American and Southern literature will appreciate the light this volume sheds on a classic American novel. Mockingbird Grows Up prepares a new generation to engage with Harper Lee's monumental work.