A few months ago the Wall Street Journal ran a splendid essay by Allen Barra that could only be described as therapeutic. Entitled “What ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Isn’t,” it was a calm, clear-headed, even humorous, evisceration of a novel that seems to be universally admired, required reading in every classroom–and a sickening repository of every enlightened cliché about American life, with particular emphasis on the segregated South. To add insult to injury, the mediocre 1960 novel was transformed into a popular/beloved 1962 movie distinguished for its painful epigrams spoken by Gregory Peck at his lugubrious worst–“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience”—and a procession of stock characters (noble black victim, vicious white racist,  spunky/precocious tomboy) that prompted Pauline Kael to call TKAM “part eerie Southern gothic and part Hollywood self-congratulation for its enlightened racial attitudes.”

As if on cue, along comes Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ It is worth noting that the author, Mary McDonagh Murphy, is a producer of PBS documentaries, not a student of literature, and that the rogues’ gallery of witnesses she assembles to interview—Rosanne Cash, Jon Meacham, Oprah Winfrey, Rick Bragg etc.–share the same amateur status. To be sure, a few novelists are called upon to testify, but they are novelists–James Patterson, Scott Turow, Anna Quindlen—more in the Harper Lee than, say, the William Faulkner tradition.