The Big Read

This winter the library is sponsoring The Big Read. It's a program funded by the National Endowment of the Arts to encourage reading. A community organizes to read and discuss a particular book, in Charlotte's case, To Kill a Mockingbird, the 1960 novel by Alabama native Harper Lee.

The Carolina Room supports this program with an exhibit of photographs in Gallery L, the Main Library's exhibit space. Librarian Shelia Bumgarner is the exhibit organizer. She has selected quotations from the book, which is set in the 1930s, and paired them with photographs of Charlotte from that period. To accompany the photograph at the head of this post, she chose the following passage from Chapter 1:

Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence. She was a Graham from Montgomery; Atticus met her when he was first elected to the state legislature. Jem was the product of their first year of marriage; four years later I was born, and two years later our mother died from a sudden heart attack. They said it ran in her family.

The exhibit also includes stills from the equally renowned 1962 movie. (Thanks to Marsha Gaspari of Charlotte for the use of the stills.)