Month: February 2016

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There were only a couple of things we bought at the last Kentuck, and one was this print by Lisa Kesler from Illinois. Funny thing was, when I walked up and was admiring it, the artist started to explain where the quote was from…before she got too far, I gently let her in: there aren’t too many people at this festival that don’t know, and most of us can even tell you what chapter it’s from. We giggled. She understood.

It’s the perfect thing for my office.

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Going to update this list of links as more stories come in:

At the Washington Post:
In Our Times of Division, TKAM Offers Lessons in Empathy
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How “To Kill a Mockingbird” shaped race relations in America at The Economist
Atticus Finch, the lawyer who defends Tom Robinson, became the inspiration for generations of justice crusaders. His model of peaceful but persistent resistance resonated with activists. In “Why We Can’t Wait,” Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “To the Negro in 1963, as to Atticus Finch, it had become obvious that nonviolence could symbolise the gold badge of heroism rather than the white feather of cowardice.”

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Calls to Change U of Alabama Building Name to Honor Harper Lee instead of KKK Leader at the Washington Post.

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Via The Week on Lee and Berkeley Breathed’s letters:
Theirs was a mutual admiration society, with Breathed basing Bloom County on Maycomb, Alabama, the fictional setting of Mockingbird, and Lee growing to love Opus, the penguin who starred in Bloom County. Breathed made direct reference to Mockingbird in about a dozen Bloom County strips.

Letters at the NYT.

His cartoon in her memory.

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Sydney Morning Herald:
We Never Really Learnt the Lesson of TKAM

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A writer at the AJC turns in a piece after talking to a cemetery worker: He woke up at dawn to dig Harper Lee’s grave

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Harper Lee’s modest $900-a-month apartment in New York City’s Upper East Side where she renewed two-year lease just months ago from The Guardian (while this piece is straightforwardly voyeuristic, I did love seeing her name on the buzzer: “LEE – H”.

‘She was a very Southern and hospitable type of person,’ a neighbor told the Post, explaining how she would always be out of the building by 9am on a Sunday.

Every week without fail, she would leave a completed New York Magazine crossword at the door, they recalled.

‘She used to come in and say, “Remember, my knives aren’t sharp, so the steak has to be tender!”,’ he reminisced to the Post.

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Even Poynter reports: How the Birmingham News broke and told the story of Harper Lee’s death

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UCLA Library releases audio of rare Harper Lee radio interview from 1964

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Read the Eulogy for Harper Lee: ‘Atticus’ Vision of Ourselves’

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From Variety: Remembering Harper Lee on Screen, from ‘Mockingbird’ to ‘Capote’

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This is her home. Well, Nelle Harper Lee and Miss Alice’s home. How many of us have either knocked on that door, or envisioned doing it a million times?

But it’s been several years since either of them lived in this sweet little house. Miss Alice passed away in 2014 at the age of 103 after becoming the oldest lawyer to practice in the state of Alabama in 2012. And being a lawyer wasn’t all with Miss Alice. She was a force. “Go ask Miss Alice.”

Today we learned that Nelle Harper Lee has passed away. And she was *fierce*.

She said once: “In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of South Alabama.”

Oh, Nelle. You were Jane Austen and more.

The NYT’s piece (and L-rd, if she’s reading the Times in Heaven right now, she’s going to be really ticked that they included Capote’s line about the bathtub again.)

xoxo!