[HEY BOO screens Friday May 20th at 7pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art Morley Lecture Hall.]
Review by Charles Cassady Jr.
There's this term in publishing, "one-and-done." It refers to the author, typically of fiction, who only completes one book. In the romantic POV, it's a masterwork, after which the author having said everything necessary, gracefully withdraws from the scene. Or...maybe their first book bombs and they never have the heart to yield up a second, or there's a crippling writer's block, or premature death.The most famous one-and-done? Probably Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, though cases could be made for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man or John O'Brien's Leaving Las Vegas. But it's likely that to many readers To Kill a Mockingbird, published July 11, 1960, ranks above all. Probably more schoolkids read it than Twilight (one can only hope), the tale of small-town Alabama in the 1930s and how a 9-year-old motherless tomboy named Scout witnesses a racist miscarriage of justice that enriches and darkens her child's-eye-view of the world, and of her heroic lawyer father Atticus. And, unlike other one-and-dones, this author, Harper Lee, happens to be still very much alive - albeit shy of publicity.