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But one thing remains constant: our shortsightedness. Rereading Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winner in 2018 is a vastly different experience from when I first encountered the book in the early 1980s. Lee herself was divided about her own book, as revealed by the controversial 2015 publication of “Go Set a Watchman,” an abandoned earlier work that shows the characters of “Mockingbird” in a harsher light. Readers have no choice but to approach the material through the prisms of their own histories.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” tells a fundamental story about the way race and justice are inextricably bound in America. It’s a stirring, thoroughly original portrayal of a character too shadowed with doubt to be heroic yet too determined to do the right thing not to maintain our admiration, even if at times he seems hopelessly naïve.īut what was once a bildungsroman about a rowdy, independent-minded tomboy whose moral education involves coming to terms with the hypocrisies and willful blindness of the adults around her in Depression-era Alabama is now the story of an idealistic attorney forced to confront the limitations of the law as an instrument of justice in a racist society.Ĭontroversy, in any event, is unavoidable with this landmark American novel. The role that Gregory Peck turned into a moral beacon in the classic 1962 film is played by Jeff Daniels with a shambling, heavyhearted ambivalence. Scout (a vivid Celia Keenan-Bolger) retains her narrator role to a degree, though the story’s emphasis shifts to her widower father, Atticus Finch, a lawyer who has agreed to defend Tom in a tinderbox case he knows will have dangerous repercussions for all involved.

Legal and ethical questions predominate in Sorkin’s retelling.