Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" -- Most Influential Southern Novel?

  With today's news of the death of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Harper Lee, at age 89, we offer two encore episodes of Walter Edgar's Journal, each dealing with her book To Kill a Mockingbird.

The first is a discussion  between two internationally-renowned Southern-literature scholars: Dr. Trudier Harris of UNC and Dr. Noel Polk of Mississippi State University. They talk Dr. Edgar to prior to a televised debate in the SCETV series Take on the South​. The topic: "What was the most influential Southern novel of the 20th century?"

Prof. Polk chose William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom. Prof. Harris chose Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. This episode of the Journal was intended as a companion to the May 2009 installment of the SCETV series Take on the South: "What was the most influential 20th-century Southern novel?"

The second episode of Walter Edgar's Journal aired in October 2015, and was entitled How Does Harper Lee's "Go Set a Watchman" inform "Mockingbird"? Dr. Robert Brinkmeyer, Director of the Institute of Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, talks with Walter Edgar about the 2015 release of Lee’s Go Set a Watchmen (Harper Collins, 2015), as well as To Kill a Mockingbird and its place in Southern literature.