Like anyone who loves fiction, I have followed with interest the ongoing discussion about To Kill a Mockingbird and its ostensible sequel, Go Set a Watchman, which was published to much fanfare last week.
I was a middle-schooler when I first encountered the former, a book “widely regarded as a masterpiece,” according to the New York Times. Although 40 years have passed since then, the questions I have about the novel still linger. They acquired fresh resonance when one of my sons was assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird in middle school. 
Apparently, few if any books had emerged in the interim between my school days and his to replace Harper Lee’s novel on required-reading lists. The dustiness of such lists became painfully apparent as my son described sitting through celebrations of Mockingbird in his majority-white classroom before heading straight to another class in which Uncle Tom’s Cabin was being discussed with similar reverence.
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