To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
Summary
Maycomb, Alabama, in the middle of the Depression. Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, is six when the book opens and narrates it years later as an adult, which is why the voice can be a child's and wry about that child at the same time.
The first half is a small town summer: Scout, her brother Jem and their visiting friend Dill, the dare to touch the Radley house, school, Calpurnia's kitchen, the neighbours, the terrifying grandeur of Aunt Alexandra. The second half is a trial. Their father Atticus, a lawyer, is appointed to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of raping Mayella Ewell, and demonstrates in open court that he could not have done it. The jury convicts him anyway.
Lee runs the two halves together so the children learn the same lesson twice, once from Tom and once from the man in the Radley house, and the last chapters bring both home in the dark.
It reads easily and quickly, and is usually assigned at twelve or thirteen, which flattens it. Read as an adult it is a stranger book: the courtroom is a set piece about the limits of individual decency rather than a triumph, and Atticus is a man who tells his daughter to find something to sympathise with in a lynch mob.
Around three hundred pages.
Readers should know the criticism as well as the praise. The Black characters have little interior life, the moral weight sits with a white lawyer, and Black writers have been saying so since 1960.
Best for readers coming back to it after school, which is when most of it becomes visible.
Historical Context & Significance
To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Harper Lee's first novel and, for the next fifty five years, her only one. It sold about half a million copies in its first year and spent nearly two years on the New York Times bestseller list, and has since passed tens of millions of copies in forty languages.
Robert Mulligan filmed it in 1962. Gregory Peck won the Academy Award for Best Actor as Atticus and Horton Foote won for the screenplay, and that performance has shaped how the character is read ever since.
The book now sits in two lists at once. PBS viewers cast more than four million votes across the contest, and To Kill a Mockingbird was named America's best loved novel in 2018 in the Great American Read in 2018, and it remains one of the most frequently challenged titles in American schools, contested both for its racial slurs and, increasingly, for centring a white lawyer in a story about Black suffering.
Go Set a Watchman, published in 2015 from a manuscript that preceded it, shows an older Atticus at a Citizens' Council meeting. The circumstances of that publication, months after the death of Lee's sister and lawyer, drew sustained criticism.