Why Gove Shouldn’t Kill the Mockingbird
I read To Kill A Mocking Bird as part of the english literature syllabus at school together with Steinbeck’s The Pearl. I also read Middlemarch and Shakespeare, a good rounded education if ever there was one!
Originally posted on Interesting Literature:
Regular readers of this blog may know that we at Interesting Literature are rather fond of the following story about the genesis of To Kill a Mockingbird. The story goes that Harper Lee’s friends gave her a year’s wages for Christmas, on condition that she give up work and write. By any standard of measurement, she used the time off work wisely: she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. It was published in 1960 and remains her only novel. Harper Lee – or Nelle Harper Lee, to give her her full name – is now 88 years old, but her one novel has done enough by itself to secure her reputation. It has sold over 30 million copies.
This morning, it was reported that Michael Gove, the UK Education Secretary, has removed To Kill a Mockingbird and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men from the school GCSE syllabus. Gove…
View original 668 more words
