Novel
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee · 1960
Synopsis
Scout Finch, nearly six at the start of the narrative, tells of three years in Maycomb, a small Alabama town, during the Depression. With her brother Jem and Dill, a boy who has come to spend the summer with his aunt, she tries to lure Boo Radley out of his house, a reclusive neighbour whom no one ever sees. Their father, Atticus, a widowed lawyer of nearly fifty, is appointed by the court to defend Tom Robinson, a Black farm labourer accused of raping a young white woman. He decides to defend him in earnest, against the advice of part of the town.
Context
The manuscript she submitted in 1957 was judged by her editor, Tay Hohoff, to be closer to a series of anecdotes than to a novel; she had her rewrite it for more than two years, shifting the narrative from the adult woman to the child she had been. During this work, the author threw her pages out of the window one evening, into the snow, then picked them up at her editor's request. The first manuscript, found in a bank vault, appeared in 2015 as a new novel, which it was not. In 2025, a posthumous collection brought together unpublished stories and her journalism.
Who it is for
A first-person novel in which an adult looks back on her childhood. The first part is made up of neighbourhood scenes, the second centres on a trial and its aftermath.
Prizes and reception
Pulitzer Prize 1961 and more than forty million copies sold; it is one of the novels that American high schools most often assign.
Sources for this page 19
The pages consulted to check this page.