To Kill a Mockingbird

Summary

Narrated by Scout Finch looking back on her Depression-era childhood in a small Alabama town, the novel intertwines a child's-eye chronicle of neighbors and games with her father Atticus's defense of a Black man accused of assaulting a white woman. Lee balances warm, episodic storytelling with a steady moral inquiry into prejudice, courage, and the limits of the law. The book has become one of the most widely taught and read American novels of the twentieth century.