One of my favorite novels of all time but year, it’s so ingrained into our consciousness it loses a lot of its impact. OTOH, it makes it ripe for parodies such as this South Park episode.
Just so we are clear about the time frame:
For example, “one white guy disagreed enough with the white community to risk their mild disapproval.” Recall the scene that Atticus was the only person between Tom and lynching? Not exactly ‘mild disapproval’.
Atticus is the person we should all try to be, accomplished, never boastful, living by his principles regardless. Wife is gone, pretty neighbor lady is clearly interested, but Atticus doesn’t pursue it, for reasons we can only guess at. He has hidden depths we can only guess at, but we know they are there. And he doesn’t do this, either “feel scorn and contempt towards the other whites in the town”, even though he could, he treats all with respect.
I don’t even have to click. It’s the one when they lose the internet, isn’t it? 
Precisely what you said. It’s not so much a story at this point as a part of our culture. When I read it for the first time, when I got to the part:
[QUOTE= Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath]
Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad - I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise, and livin’ in the houses they build - I’ll be there, too."
[/QUOTE]
I actually laughed out loud, from surprise. “So THAT’S where that meme is from!” I’d heard it mimicked or parodied many times before reading the source.
As for TKIM, I enjoyed it well enough, but didn’t LOVE it. I liked the parts with the kids playing and talking together, as it felt pretty authentic, but I think it’s largely a product of it’s time. It’s place in that time needs to be considered to fully appreciate it, and I think you can only approximate that without having lived through that period.
Perhaps you are thinking of Charles Portis.
Yeah, Over Logging (1206)
Transient Man 5: Think about it. How many folk headin’ out to Californee? A million? More? And how much Internet you think they got out there? [the other men look at each other] Might be some Internet, sure, but with everyone tryin’ to use it at once, it’s gonna go real slow-like. I knows it ‘cause I seen it. My two children, they tried to load a Web page. Took them over three days. They sat there waitin’, and by the time the loadin’ bar was only half-full they was dead. [his eyes begin to well up] Starve on the Internet, with a belly stuck out like a bladder… [weeps]
When the townspeople went to the jail to lynch Robinson, they would have had to beat Atticus to a pulp or kill him to get past him. And they would have, and Atticus knew it. It was only Scout showing up and shaming them that saved Atticus and Robinson.
There’s a very good documentary on both the film and the movie – Hey Boo: Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbord. If you have Netflix Streaming, you can see it there.
It tries, most of the time successfully IMO, to put both in the context of their time.
Because both the movie and the book are so quietly well done.
Well said.
The book to me is a 20th century Huck Finn. It is a truly genuine American novel about real people and learning the lessons of life in the context of history. The film waters down the book somewhat, but it is artistically done.
To Kill a Mockingbird is the best encapsulation I’ve seen for what it means to be a good person. You must understand that the world can be ugly, but trying to help, trying to look past the surface, and trying to be fair and honest and kind can help. You can’t make the world good, ever. You can make it better. And you’re not allowed to demean or hate people, even if you ARE better than they are.
Confession: I picked up the book only because of a girl I was dating. She had a cat named Boo Radley. She dumped me and I dumped the book.
Why do I have the feeling that you either haven’t read, or haven’t understood, Flannery O’Connor?
Wonderful book but don’t ascribe a work of fiction as the end all and be all understanding of an era or culture. It’s fiction. That is all.
Is that you, Hulga?
That was part of the reason I liked it so much. It’s an authentic-seeming window to a different time and place. Harper Lee drew heavily on her childhood when writing it.
(I’ve only read the book, I haven’t seen the film).
I did not get from the film that we were seeing everything through Scout’s eyes. In fact, I thought I had read the book in the past, but a lot of stuff in that documentary made me realize I hadn’t–I’d just seen the movie.
You can read the book in its entirety online for free here.
The narrator is Scout as an adult, first-person. “Atticus would be up all night with Jem…”