ANNA QUINDLEN: When I was a kid I collected insurrectionary, outspoken, not girly girls in books. There was Anne of Green Gables and there’s Joe March in Little Women, and there’s Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Sound up from movie (Scout attacking Walter Cunningham) “Darn you, Walter Cunningham!

TOM BROKAW: Scout is irresistible. She’s just irresistible.

DAVID KIPEN: She’s a scamp and hysterically funny and no less funny as an adult looking back although in a slightly more fermented and seasoned way. And she’s just great company.

MARY BADHAM: I felt so attached to her. I just wish I could have been as smart as Scout. Always been there with the comeback, but oh well. Sound up: TKM Scout fighting after school.

Jem: what do you think you’re doing?

WALLY LAMB: I loved the fact that she’s a little smartass. She speaks first with her fist and then has to sort of back up three or four steps. She’s sort of an extension of like a Huck Finn character. She’s very typically an American character in that she is poking at the boundaries of good taste and you know, what’s proper.

Sound up: TKM – Scout: “Hey Miss Dubose.” Mrs. Dubose: “Don’t you say ‘Hey’ to me you ugly girl. You say good afternoon, Miss Dubose.”

LIZZIE SKURNICK: She doesn’t have a mother. In many ways her childhood is very lonely and it’s only her interest in other people that makes it a full childhood. She’s really an explorer. She truly struggles in the way we struggle as adults, to figure out how to be in the world.

LEE SMITH: And here’s Scout , you know, who believes in things, who is funny and curious and passionate and a tomboy and I think Scout has done more for southern womanhood than any other character in literature. Sound up: TKM (Scout wearing dress for first day of school)

Atticus: “Come in here, Scout. Have your breakfast.”

ADRIANA TRIGIANI: (reading) “Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore britches.”

Sound up: TKM/Scout: “I still don’t think I have to wear a darn ol’ dress.”

“Aunt Alexandra’s vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing the Anna pearl necklace she gave me when I was born. Furthermore I should be a ray of sunshine in my father’s lonely life. I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants just as well but Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam.”

ADRIANA TRIGIANI: the emphasis that her Aunt Alexandra on the way she looks. Well, this is what we do to girls, you know. You’re worth something if you’re beautiful.

ANNA QUINDLEN: I think one of the reasons I became so obsessed with Harper Lee is because everything that she did convinced me that she was just a grown up Scout who hadn’t gone over to the dark side of being a girly girl. Sound up TKM Narrator “Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it.”

NARRATOR: A GROWN UP SCOUT IS THE NARRATOR OF TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.

SCOUT IS SIMULTANEOUSLY AN ADULT LOOKING BACK AND A CHILD EXPERIENCING LIFE IN A SMALL TOWN. A DIFFICULT FEAT, ASK ANY WRITER.

ALLAN GURGANUS: 04:07:17: Very very tough, because she has to both be a kid on the street and aware of the mad dogs and the spooky houses, and have this beautiful vision of how justice works and all the creaking mechanisms of the courthouse.

JAMES MCBRIDE: Many writers have tried it, many writers, they do it all the time, the innocent child business. But this child sees the world as an adult, she sees the world through a child’s eyes but with an adult’s understanding. And that’s part of why this is a great book and that’s why Harper Lee is a great American writer.

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