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Schools

Westport Library Celebrates 50th Anniversary of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

A Bedford Middle School teacher speaks of the book's appeal.

The Westport Public Library honored author Harper Lee in absentia Sunday on the 50th anniversary of her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Kerstin Warner, teacher of the gifted program at the Bedford Middle School, was asked by the library to present the film version of the child's-eye view of racial injustice in rural 1932 Alabama and then lead a discussion in the McManus Room.

Warner, who frequently volunteers to lead book discussions at the library,  had seen the 1962 film, which won Gregory Peck an Academy Award for best actor, but she had not read the book.

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So  a few days ago, Warner happily savored the book in her hammock and then feasted on two more current books about Lee and her groundbreaking work. Warner also checked out the film from the Westport Library.

"I've now seen the film four times in the past two weeks and I am riveted every single time," she said. "It gets to me!"

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As for the book, Warner loved reading it.

"It is beautiful storytelling and has terrific sensory details," she said enthusiastically to her audience of 35 mostly middle-aged and older women.

"It's a beautiful treatment of a particular period American history," she said. "It was time to confront a terrible injustice."

The story is told through the eyes of Jean Louise Finch (nickname Scout), a precocious 7-year-old whose  lawyer father, Atticus, has been appointed to represent a black man wrongfully accused of raping a white woman.

An unforgettable scene unfolds when Scout turns away a lynch mob by appealing to their sense of decency. Atticus cannot win acquittal by the all-white male jury, but his impassioned closing argument in the film version gives Warner goosebumps each time she sees it.

"The book's not a soapbox," she said. The issue of racial injustice "is very delicately handled."

Scout is a stand-in for the author herself, Warner said, who prepared herself for the talk by reading Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, an unauthorized biography by Charles Shield published in 2006, as well as Scout, Atticus and Boo, a collection of reflections on To Kill a Mockingbird by contemporary figures.

"The more I read, the more I learned, the more I enjoyed," she said. The library has four copies of a 50th anniversary edition of the book.

Today, Lee, 84, leads a semi-reclusive life in Monroeville, Ala., which is the same setting for the book. Warner said the town maintans a firewall to respect her privacy.

Iris Frey of Westport, who attended the film screening and talk, was proud to share the fact that she had actually met Lee in person.

The occasion was the publication in 1986 of Salute to America Celebrity Cookbook in 1986 by J.S. Penney. Frey was one of the editors and Lee had been invited to submit a favorite recipe.

"It was a recipe for something she called 'Writer's Soup' and she hand-delivered it to our office at Olympic Tower," Frey recalled. "She wore sensible shoes and no makeup."

Other attendees observed that childhood as depicted in the film, when children played outdoors  unsupervised all day, made up their own games and engaged in face-to-face conversations, is disappearing in the computer age.

That was not so in the book itself, which sold 9 million copies between 1960, when it was published, and 1962, when the film version was released.

'To Kill a Mockingbird' is required reading for 8th graders in Westport's middle schools, Warner said, and she is very happy that her own incoming 8th grader will be introduced to the work.

While she does not teach English classes, Warner's students will doubtless be exposed to Warner's enthusiasm for the book and her literary discoveries, including the fact that Lee grew up next door to Truman Capote and assisted him in researching his acclaimed "In Cold Blood."

"Pretty much everything in my life turns up in my teaching," she said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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