When you take the job, you receive a style guide-essentially SparkNotes on writing SparkNotes. Writing SparkNotes can get your endorphins flowing in the same strange way that taking a standardized test does. After all, she professed to have empathy for her flawed but ultimately deeply human characters. Waldman also points out that Lee herself, ironically, would probably have approved of her flawed legacy. Go Set a Watchman was riddled with controversy before anyone had even read it-and it was still more problematic afterward.Īs Katy Waldman wrote for Slate, Lee’s legacy has become complicated by “a sort of collective disenchantment, or an interlocking series of disappointments”-disappointments fueled in large part by Go Set a Watchman. Between February and the book’s publication in July, my sense of dread eclipsed my anticipation. That changed, of course, in February 2015-as soon as HarperCollins announced the publication of Go Set a Watchman, my grandmother ordered me a copy. When I was growing up, Harper Lee was beloved in part for the scarcity of her work: she’d contributed a single gem to the literary canon, one that made her an untouchable icon. You would oblige me if you would accept the signed tip-in instead of sending me a book. One thing the recent New York Times piece did not say is that because of my failing eyesight it is difficult for me to sign books. When I opened it, two handwritten notes slid out: When I graduated from high school, my grandparents gave me a new, hardbound copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee lived a private life, but she was quietly and extraordinarily generous.” Lee signed a copy of Looking for Alaska for him with the inscription, ‘Welcome to the world Henry Atticus.’ … That book is my most prized possession. John Green, who has produced a Crash Course video about To Kill a Mockingbird for PBS, wrote a short series of elegiac tweets to commemorate Lee: “The great Harper Lee has died at the age of eighty-nine … When my son Henry was born, Ms. Harper Lee’s death, on February 19, 2016, inspired a flood of tributes. (Both deploy CamelCase, a medial capital in a compound word.) An early ad for the service described the difference between the two: “CliffsNotes cost money … but … SparkNotes are FREE!” Eventually, dating and studying were uncoupled: the matchmaking site became OkCupid and the study guides became SparkNotes-essentially CliffsNotes for the Internet age. Since TheSpark’s target audience was high school and college students, the founders posted literature study guides to lure them in. SparkNotes started in 1999, when four Harvard graduates dreamed up, a portal to host their new matchmaking service. And each is compartmentalized into familiar rubrics: summary, analysis, themes, symbols, motifs, context, character list, analysis of major characters, and, of course, a multiple-choice quiz. If, as Henry James wrote, a work of fiction is a house with a million windows, SparkNotes are condo units: they’re all the same size and shape, whether they summarize The Outsiders or War and Peace. Last August, I wrote the SparkNotes for Go Set a Watchman. To Kill a Mockingbird showed me how to create a fully realized, sensory world. Dubose dies, the white box that her servant gives to Jem with one pristine, waxy camellia resting inside. The day when Jem, in a sudden rampage, snatches Scout’s baton and shears off all the buds and flowers on the camellia bushes. Dubose with her perfect camellias, ivory and globular against the glossy leaves. Miss Maudie’s house going up in flames, like a pumpkin, and her prized azaleas frozen and charred in the aftermath. I remember the book in discrete images: Dill’s duckweed-like tufts of hair. I read it, reread it, and reread it again, sitting in an attic bedroom of my grandparents’ house, hunched on the green shag carpet. In the corner, a crescent moon as thin as a tea-stain rose above a clot of green trees. Its cover featured the knot of a tree with a pocket watch and a ball of yarn inside, a mockingbird stamped in silhouette. My copy of Mockingbird was a cheap lilac paperback. The summer when I was eight, I read two books: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and To Kill a Mockingbird.
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