On the recordJuly 26, 2010
I commend the gentleman from Alabama for coming forward with this resolution honoring Harper Lee, who is perhaps one of the most-esteemed constituents he or any before him have had in his home State. Harper Lee's novel teaches us something about the American novel and indeed about fiction throughout human time: that fiction often tells us what history books cannot convey. This is what Harper Lee managed to do at a time when writing about her subject was anything but popular literature until she had put it on paper, in which case, it rose out of her skill to be embraced by the American people and many across the world. This book is very interesting because it is a product of a very distinct era in American history and life, and yet the novel continues to reverberate and inspire our very different era, an era revising itself from that era. Unadulterated racial prejudice of a kind described in this novel has abated. It certainly is no longer openly celebrated as it once was. Yet, what Harper Lee writes about has left a mark so deep in American history that it will never be entirely erased. That's why the novel continues to speak to us. It's not that we believe anything like what she writes about is what we find in American courtrooms, even in the old South today. It is that it reminds us of the distance we have come and for many the distance we have to go. Harper Lee, it is said over and over again, wrote this one great novel.…
