Dear Editor:
Anxiously awaiting the release date of Go Set a Watchman, my fiancé made a curious observation when he googled Harper Lee. He noted that, “She wrote To Kill a Mockingbird and then for almost fifty years, she didn’t do almost anything else.” From his passing observation, we can see that Harper Lee is not the typical celebrity author who uses social media to build up a fan base and to keep herself in the public eye. While my fiancé’s statement gives insight into today’s definition of relevancy, Googling Harper Lee in and of itself makes a statement that stands out when one thinks back to an quintessential American childhood reading To Kill a Mockingbird. When I read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time, the only ways to find out more information about the author was to consult my ever- knowledgeable parents or to look her up in my school’s set of encyclopedias. My childhood (in the late 1990’s/ early 2000’s) boasts the last generation to remember elementary school without the Internet. When I was a kid reading To Kill a Mockingbird my town marked relevancy and “doing something” in a way that today’s youth would interpret as not doing anything: visiting. Visiting, like To Kill a Mockingbird, is a pillar of an innocent childhood that the newest generation of Harper Lee readers may not be all too familiar with. In 2015 is easy to assume that a famous person “doesn’t do anything” when they are not constantly making headlines in news articles or updating social media platforms. However, when Harper Lee first became famous, visiting meant building strong relationships with family and friends though spending long amounts of regularly scheduled time together. When those important relationships were formed and maintained in person, you were relevant. It didn’t matter how many likes you received on Instagram or how many followers you had on Twitter. The new definition of relevancy is posting to these social media sites. In Harper Lee’s writing days, visiting was a main tool to build strong, committed, yet private, one- on- one relationships. Visiting meant you were relevant to the people who meant the most to you, and that was relevant enough. By today’s standards, Harper Lee lived a mostly non- relevant existence in between publishing her two books. But by rejecting social media norms and modern pressure to be the new kind of relevant, I believe that Harper Lee holds a life far more interesting and meaningful than we could imagine. Perhaps middle school students of today who will read both To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman in class can learn something from Harper Lee about the power of relevancy by face-to-face relationship building instead of social media sharing.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth C. Medlin