To Kill a Mockingbird

There are select seminal texts we may want to keep close to hand over the next four years. Dario Fo’s chillingly comic Accidental Death of an Anarchist; Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, which follows a petty little gangster’s ascent to terrible power; Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, a text on the normalization of fascism. And To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s drama about racism in the Deep South, and how much moral resilience it takes to stand up to ubiquitous evil in your own community. As portrayed by Gregory Peck in Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film version, lawyer Atticus Finch is not a hero because he’s perfect, but because he fights for the right reasons, even when it seems the battle is inevitably hopeless. But hope – as another author you should keep on hand, Studs Terkel, once wrote – dies last. – Richard Whittaker