The Chicago Public Library has selected the 1960 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee as the focus of a citywide reading initiative to get all Chicagoans reading and discussing the same book during the month of September. The “One Book, One Chicago” program will culminate in the city’s second annual Chicago Book Week, October 8–14, with book discussions, screenings of the movie based on the book, and a mock trial of Tom Robinson, the black man in the novel accused of raping a white woman in a small Southern town.
Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey said on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered August 7 that the idea is to “encourage people to read this provocative, interesting American classic and to talk about it.”
The novel, frequently challenged for its use of profanity and racial epithets, was number 40 on the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom’s list of “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999.” Ironically, on the same day that CPL made its decision, the book was pulled from the required reading list for freshmen at Muskogee (Okla.) High School to avoid putting students in what Principal Terry Saul called “an uncomfortable situation,” according to an August 3 Associated Press report.
Posted August 13, 2001.