To Kill a Mockingbird Summary: Harper Lee's Story of Maycomb, Alabama
What To Kill a Mockingbird is about
Harper Lee's novel was published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. It is set over three years, 1933 to 1935, in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression. The narrator is Jean Louise Finch, known as Scout, who is six when the book opens. She lives with her older brother Jem and their widowed father Atticus, a middle-aged lawyer.
The first half of the book is mostly childhood. Scout, Jem and their summer friend Dill are fascinated and frightened by a neighbour they have never seen, the reclusive Arthur "Boo" Radley. The adults of Maycomb avoid talking about him. The children invent rumours about his appearance and scheme about how to lure him out of the house. Then small gifts start appearing in a tree outside the Radley place, carved figurines and trinkets left by someone who never shows his face.
The second half turns on a trial. Judge Taylor appoints Atticus to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of raping a young white woman, Mayella Ewell. Much of Maycomb disapproves, but Atticus takes the case seriously and defends Tom as well as he can. Other children taunt Jem and Scout over it, using a racial slur for their father. Scout wants to fight them, though Atticus has told her not to. One night a group of men arrive intent on lynching Tom. The children turn up unexpectedly, and Scout breaks the mood of the mob simply by recognising a classmate's father and talking to him person to person.
The novel is described as both Southern Gothic and a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story. Lee based the plot and characters loosely on her own family, her neighbours and an event near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.
The main characters
Scout narrates, and her voice carries the book. She is curious, quick-tempered and literal, and she notices far more than the adults think she does. Jem is a few years older, and the trial lands on him harder. His faith in justice is badly shaken by what happens in the courtroom.
Atticus Finch has become one of the most recognisable figures in American fiction. The historian Joseph Crespino has called him "the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism" in twentieth-century writing. He has served as a moral example for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers.
Calpurnia is the family's Black cook, long part of the household and a real force in raising the two children. Dill visits Maycomb each summer to stay with his aunt. Boo Radley is the absent presence at the edge of the story. Tom Robinson is the accused man, Mayella Ewell his accuser, and her father Bob Ewell the figure who drives the final stretch of the plot. The townspeople dismiss the Ewells as "white trash" and do not trust them, which makes the jury's decision all the more telling.
The themes
Racial injustice and the loss of innocence sit at the centre. Scholars also point to class, courage, compassion and gender roles in the Deep South. Maycomb has an elaborate social ranking, and the trial exposes how race overrides even the town's own contempt for the Ewells.
Running under all of it is the lesson Scout learns about imagining life from inside another person's skin. That idea connects the Tom Robinson case to the Boo Radley story, which otherwise look like two separate books. The novel argues for tolerance and against prejudice, and it does so without losing its warmth or its humour, which is one reason it has stayed readable for generations.
How it ends
Skip this section if you want to come to the book fresh.
Atticus proves in court that Mayella and Bob Ewell are lying. Mayella made advances towards Tom and was beaten by her father for it. The jury convicts Tom anyway. Atticus hopes to win on appeal, but Tom is reported to have tried to escape from prison and is shot dead.
Bob Ewell is left humiliated rather than vindicated, because Atticus destroyed what credibility he had. He spits in Atticus's face, menaces Tom Robinson's widow and tries to break into the judge's house. Finally he attacks Jem and Scout as they walk home at night from a school pageant. Jem's arm is broken and he is knocked unconscious. Someone intervenes and carries Jem home, and Scout realises it is Boo Radley. Sheriff Tate finds Ewell dead from a knife wound. Atticus assumes Jem did it, but Tate is certain Boo was responsible and decides to record it as Ewell falling on his own knife, to protect him. Boo asks Scout to walk him home. She says goodbye at his door and never sees him again. Standing on his porch, she finally pictures the street as he has seen it all these years.
Why it still matters
The book was an immediate success and is now standard reading in American high schools and middle schools. It was adapted into the 1962 film directed by Robert Mulligan, with a screenplay by Horton Foote, which won Oscars. Since 1990 a stage version has been performed every year in Lee's hometown. In 2006 British librarians ranked it ahead of the Bible as a book every adult should read before they die.
It has also been repeatedly challenged and targeted for removal from classrooms, usually over its use of racial epithets. Crespino describes it as probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America. Interestingly, serious literary analysis of it remains sparse compared with its sales. Mary McDonough Murphy, who gathered responses to the novel from writers and public figures, called it "an astonishing phenomenon".
It was Lee's only published book until Go Set a Watchman, an earlier draft, appeared in July 2015. She guarded her privacy closely, gave her last interview to a journalist in 1964, and died in February 2016.
