Goodbye Harper Lee

Harper Lee had a very short-lived return to the limelight with the publication of a long lost novel, Go Set a Watchman. It was met with mixed reviews, largely because the novel tarnished the image of Atticus Finch we all had from To Kill a Mockingbird, widely regarded as one of the best American novels of the 20th century.

To Set a Watchman actually predated To Kill a Mockingbird, but never was published because her editor, Tay Hohoff, felt it would be best for Lee to focus on Scout's childhood. The runaway success of her latter novel meant that her first novel was tossed into the dustbin of history. It probably would never have been resurrected had not Ms. Lee regained attention in 2007, when George Bush awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Unlike most authors, Lee had only one novel to her credit, and everyone was curious if there was more. So, we were presented with To Set a Watchman in 2015, as it seems Lee didn't try to publish anything after To Kill a Mockingbird, other than a few extant articles.

It was very hard to top To Kill a Mockingbird, which sold more than 40 million copies and was made into a cinematic classic. No one has tried to remake the 1962 film starring Gregory Peck and Mary Badham as Scout, and for good reason. Some questioned if it even came from her hand, attributing the novel to her childhood friend, Truman Capote. Still, you would think Harper Lee continued to write and that there are other manuscripts hidden away, which now may see the light of day. For the time being, we will have to settle for a 1983 essay, Romance and High Adventure, which was published in an anthology of Southern writers, Clearings in the Thicket, in 1985.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified. After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution. Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through. But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others. Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified. A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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