Britain's education minister says he has not killed a mockingbird, but many literature-lovers don't believe him. Michael Gove has outraged some readers and academics with his campaign to put the basics - and Britishness - back into schools.
Long-time American favourites including John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird are off the syllabus for a major high school English qualification under new guidelines that focus almost exclusively on writers from Britain and Ireland.
Exam boards in England and Wales have released their new booklists for the English literature GCSE, an exam taken by 16-year-olds after a two-year course of study.
Michael Gove wants everybody studying traditional literature
Gone are Lee, Steinbeck, Arthur Miller's play The Crucible and the autobiography of Maya Angelou, who died on May 28. Gone, too, are African and Asian writers, including Haruki Murakami, Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche.
The purge is the product - although not, the government says, the goal - of an attempt to make the school curriculum more rigorous.
New government rules say GCSE pupils must study "high quality, intellectually challenging, and substantial" works, including a 19th-century novel, a selection of poetry, a play by William Shakespeare and post-1914 fiction or drama "from the British Isles".
Previous rules mentioned "contemporary writers" without reference to nationality. A requirement to study authors from different cultures has been dropped.
"I haven't banned anything," Gove wrote in The Daily Telegraph. "All we are doing is asking exam boards to broaden - not narrow - the books young people study for GCSE."