To Kill a Mockingbird

Summary

To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, looking back as an adult on three years of her childhood, from the summer she was nearly six, in Maycomb, a small, poor county seat in Alabama during the Depression of the 1930s. She lives with her older brother Jem, their widowed father Atticus, a lawyer and state legislator, and Calpurnia, the Black cook who helps raise them. Part One follows the children's summers with Dill, a small, imaginative boy who visits his aunt next door, and their fascination with Arthur Radley, called Boo, a recluse who has not left the house across the street for years and about whom the neighbourhood tells frightening stories. They dare one another to touch the Radley house, try to send Boo a note on a fishing pole, and lose Jem's trousers on the Radley fence one night, only to find them later mended and folded. Someone leaves small gifts in the knothole of an oak by the Radley yard, gum, pennies, carved soap figures, a broken watch, until Boo's brother cements the hole shut. During a winter fire at their neighbour Miss Maudie's house, someone drapes a blanket over Scout's shoulders without her noticing. Atticus, whom the children think dull, shoots a mad dog in the street with a single shot, and sends Jem to read aloud to the sharp-tongued old Mrs. Dubose, who, they learn after her death, was breaking herself of a morphine habit before she died. Part Two centres on the trial of Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of raping Mayella Ewell, the daughter of Bob Ewell, the town's most shiftless white man. Atticus is appointed to defend him and does so seriously, enduring insults from neighbours and family. The children see Atticus face down a lynch mob at the jail, which disperses after Scout innocently greets one of its members, Mr. Cunningham, by asking after his son. At the trial, watched by the children from the coloured balcony, Atticus shows that Mayella was beaten by a left-handed man and that Tom's left arm was crippled in a cotton gin, and Tom testifies that Mayella invited him in and kissed him. The jury convicts him anyway. Tom is later shot while trying to escape from the prison farm. Bob Ewell, humiliated, threatens the Finches and on Halloween night attacks Jem and Scout as they walk home from a school pageant. Boo Radley saves them, carrying the injured Jem home; Ewell is found dead with a kitchen knife in him. The sheriff, Heck Tate, insists that Ewell fell on his knife, and Atticus agrees, and Scout walks Boo home and stands on his porch to see the street from his side. J. B. Lippincott published the novel on 11 July 1960; it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961.

Plot or Argument

• Part One, Chapters 1-3: Maycomb and the Radley place

  Scout recalls the summer Dill arrived and the legend of Boo Radley; her first day of school with Miss Caroline, the fight with Walter Cunningham, and Atticus's advice to see things from another person's point of view.

• Chapters 4-7: Gifts and dares

  The children act out Boo's story, find gifts in the oak's knothole, and lose Jem's trousers on the Radley fence; Nathan Radley fills the knothole with cement.

• Chapters 8-11: Courage at home

  The snowfall and Miss Maudie's fire; the coming trial casts its shadow at school and at Finch's Landing at Christmas; Atticus shoots the mad dog, and Jem reads to Mrs. Dubose until her death frees her from morphine.

• Part Two, Chapters 12-16: Before the trial

  Calpurnia takes the children to her church; Aunt Alexandra moves in; Dill runs away to the Finches; Atticus guards the jail and Scout's words to Mr. Cunningham turn the mob away.

• Chapters 17-21: The trial

  Heck Tate, Bob Ewell and Mayella testify; Atticus shows the injuries came from a left-handed attacker; Tom Robinson testifies; Atticus makes his closing appeal; the jury returns a guilty verdict.

• Chapters 22-26: After the verdict

  Jem's grief and Miss Maudie's comfort; Bob Ewell spits at Atticus; Tom is killed trying to escape; Scout hears the missionary circle ladies and her teacher talk about justice without seeing their own town.

• Chapters 27-31: Halloween and Boo

  Ewell's threats; the pageant and the attack in the dark; Boo Radley rescues the children; Heck Tate rules that Ewell fell on his knife; Scout walks Boo home and sees the street from his porch.

Characters

• Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, narrator

  A fierce, curious tomboy whose childhood view is framed by her adult memory.

• Atticus Finch, Scout's father

  A widowed lawyer of quiet integrity who defends Tom Robinson.

• Jeremy Atticus "Jem" Finch, Scout's brother

  Four years older than Scout, he moves from childish games to a painful sense of justice.

• Charles Baker "Dill" Harris, summer friend

  A small, inventive boy who spends summers next door and longs to make Boo come out.

• Arthur "Boo" Radley, recluse

  The hidden neighbour of the children's fears who secretly watches over them.

• Tom Robinson, defendant

  A Black field hand with a crippled left arm, falsely accused of rape.

• Bob Ewell, accuser

  A drunken, idle father who accuses Tom and later attacks the Finch children.

• Mayella Ewell, accuser

  Bob's lonely eldest daughter, who keeps red geraniums in slop jars.

• Calpurnia, the Finches' cook

  A firm, devoted woman who disciplines and protects the children and takes them to her church.

• Miss Maudie Atkinson, neighbour

  A cheerful gardener and the children's wisest adult friend outside the family.

• Heck Tate, sheriff

  Testifies at the trial and decides how Bob Ewell's death will be told.

• Aunt Alexandra, Atticus's sister

  A proper lady concerned with family name, who moves in to give Scout feminine influence.

• Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose, neighbour

  A bitter old woman who conquers her morphine addiction before dying.

Lessons

• Standing in another's shoes

  Atticus's first lesson to Scout, after her bad day at school, is that you cannot understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. The novel tests the lesson on Walter Cunningham, Mrs. Dubose, Mayella and finally Boo, whose view of the street Scout literally takes in the last chapter.

  • Whose point of view does Scout learn to take, and when?
  • Does Atticus ever try to see things from Bob Ewell's point of view?
  • How does the final scene on the Radley porch complete the lesson?

• Real courage

  Atticus sends Jem to read to Mrs. Dubose so that he will see a kind of courage different from a man with a gun: knowing you are beaten before you begin and going on anyway. His own defense of Tom is the same kind of courage, and the novel contrasts it with the mob's.

  • Why is Atticus's shooting of the mad dog not the courage he wants Jem to admire?
  • In what ways is the defense of Tom like Mrs. Dubose's struggle?
  • Who else in the book shows courage that is easy to miss?

• The law and the conscience of a town

  Atticus shows Tom's innocence clearly, but the jury convicts. Miss Maudie notes that the jury stayed out for hours rather than minutes, and Atticus tells Jem that a courtroom is only as sound as the jurors in it. The book shows the limits of law when hearts are hard, and the small steps by which a town might change.

  • What evidence does Atticus present that Tom could not have beaten Mayella?
  • Why does Miss Maudie think the long deliberation matters?
  • What does Mr. Underwood's editorial say about Tom's death?

• Sin to kill a mockingbird

  Atticus's one use of the word sin is about shooting songbirds that do no harm, and Miss Maudie explains it. The image returns in Mr. Underwood's editorial on Tom and in Scout's understanding of why the sheriff will not drag Boo into the light. Innocence that does no harm deserves protection.

  • Who are the mockingbirds of the novel?
  • Was Heck Tate right to say that Bob Ewell fell on his knife?

Context

The novel is set in the mid-1930s in a fictional Alabama county much like Lee's own Monroeville, in a South marked by the Depression, rigid racial segregation, and the threat of lynching. The trial of a Black man on a white woman's word recalls cases of the period, of which the Scottsboro trials of the 1930s were the most famous; Lee's father had himself defended two Black men in a 1919 murder case in Monroeville. The novel appeared in 1960, in the years of the Montgomery bus boycott and the early civil rights movement, and was read at once in that light.

Composition

Lee drew on her childhood: Atticus has traits of her father, and Dill is widely understood to be based on her childhood friend Truman Capote. She worked on the book through the late 1950s with the editor Tay Hohoff at J. B. Lippincott, reshaping an earlier manuscript, later published as Go Set a Watchman (2015), into the story told from Scout's childhood. Lippincott published it on 11 July 1960.

Reception

It was an immediate bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. Robert Mulligan's 1962 film, with Horton Foote's screenplay and Gregory Peck as Atticus, won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor. The book has sold more than thirty million copies, has been translated into more than forty languages, and has long been among the most widely taught American novels; it has also been regularly challenged in schools, chiefly for its language and its rape trial.

Comparisons

• adventures-of-huckleberry-finn

  Two Southern novels told by children who learn to see a Black man's goodness against the voice of their society; Huck decides to help Jim at the risk of his soul, and Scout watches her father defend Tom at the risk of his standing.

• twelve-angry-men

  Both turn on a jury weighing a vulnerable defendant amid prejudice; Rose's single holdout juror wins, while Atticus's careful defense cannot.

• of-mice-and-men

  Lennie and Tom are both crippled or disabled outsiders accused after encounters with a lonely young woman, and both books end in a killing outside the law.

• the-adventures-of-tom-sawyer

  A courtroom in a small Southern town, children who witness a crime, and a feared outsider: Twain's Injun Joe and Lee's Boo Radley invert each other.

• sermons-and-letter-from-birmingham-jail

  King wrote from an Alabama jail in 1963 about white moderates who prefer order to justice; Maycomb's missionary circle and its silent neighbours are the kind of people he addressed.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Everything the children find in the knothole of the oak by the Radley lot in Chapters 4-7, and what happens to Jem's trousers after the night raid. Ask who has been watching the children.
• Atticus's advice to Scout at the end of Chapter 3 about seeing from another's point of view, and the moment in Chapter 31 when Scout stands on the Radley porch.
• The two kinds of courage in Chapters 10-11: Atticus shooting the mad dog and Mrs. Dubose fighting her addiction.
• The scene at the jail in Chapter 15: what Scout says to Mr. Cunningham and why it works.
• The physical evidence in the trial (which side of Mayella's face was bruised, which hand Bob Ewell writes with, Tom's arm) and how Atticus uses it.

Key terms and names

Maycomb

The slow, poor county seat in Alabama where the story happens, where everyone knows everyone's family and their reputations.

The Radley Place

The shuttered house down the street where Boo Radley has stayed inside for years, the centre of the children's games and fears in Part One.

Finch's Landing

The family homestead on the river, where Aunt Alexandra lives before she moves into town, and where Scout fights her cousin Francis over insults to Atticus.

Entailment

A legal arrangement restricting how land can be passed on. Scout learned of Mr. Cunningham's entailment from Atticus, and her talk about it disarms the mob.

The coloured balcony

The courthouse gallery where Black spectators sat; Reverend Sykes brings the Finch children up there to watch the trial.

First Purchase church

Calpurnia's congregation, built with the first earnings of freed slaves, where the children see her other life and the collection for Tom's wife Helen.

Mockingbird

A songbird that does no harm and only sings; Atticus forbids the children to shoot one, and the bird comes to stand for the innocent harmed by others.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What gifts do Jem and Scout find in the knothole, and who stops them, and how?
2. Comprehension Why does Atticus make Jem read to Mrs. Dubose, and what does he tell Jem after she dies?
3. Comprehension What evidence does Atticus present at trial that Tom Robinson could not have beaten Mayella Ewell?
4. Interpretation Scout breaks up the mob at the jail without meaning to. What does her conversation with Mr. Cunningham show about how people act in crowds and as individuals?
5. Interpretation Mayella is both an accuser and a victim. How does Lee make the reader see her loneliness, and does that change our judgment of her lie?
6. Interpretation Why does the adult Scout tell the story of Boo Radley around the story of the trial, beginning and ending with him?
7. Interpretation Heck Tate says that Bob Ewell fell on his knife, and Atticus at last agrees. Is this a lie, a mercy, or justice of another kind?
8. Big Question Can one person's integrity change a community if the community's verdict still goes wrong? What did Atticus's defense of Tom accomplish?

Faith Connections

• Exodus 23:1-2 (Scripture)

  The law forbids raising a false report, joining hands with the wicked as an unrighteous witness, and following a multitude to do evil or to pervert justice. The Ewells' testimony, the mob at the jail and the jury's verdict break each of these commands in turn.

• Micah 6:8 (Scripture)

  The Lord requires doing justly, loving mercy and walking humbly. Atticus's steady defense of Tom, Heck Tate's protection of Boo, and Atticus's refusal to strike back at Bob Ewell show the three together.

• Luke 10:29-37 (Scripture)

  Jesus answers the question who is my neighbour with a stranger who stops for the wounded. Boo Radley, the neighbour the children feared, is the one who comes out of his house to save them.

• Augustine, City of God XIX.6 (Great Conversation)

  Augustine describes the human judge who must decide cases without seeing into the consciences of witnesses, and calls this a misery of social life to be borne with prayer. The Maycomb courtroom shows that misery when jurors refuse even to weigh what they can see.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Children begin by fearing the wrong people and trusting the town's stories. Through Atticus's example and their own experience, Jem and Scout learn that Boo Radley is kind, that Mrs. Dubose is brave, and that respectable Maycomb can convict an innocent man. Therefore the novel argues that moral understanding comes from standing in another's place and acting with courage when one is sure to lose, and that harming the harmless, whether Tom or Boo, is the deepest wrong.

Rhetorical device: frame narrative with retrospective first-person narration. The adult Jean Louise opens Chapter 1 with Jem's broken arm and the question of when it all began, then tells the story through her child's eyes; the frame closes in Chapter 31 when Scout, on the Radley porch, sees the past seasons from Boo's side.

Debate: Resolved: that Heck Tate and Atticus were right to report that Bob Ewell fell on his own knife.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Argue whether Atticus's view that most people are good when you finally see them is vindicated or tested by the events of the novel, using Mrs. Dubose, Mr. Cunningham, Mayella and Boo as evidence.

Comparison with Twelve Angry Men: Juror 8 in Twelve Angry Men persuades eleven men; Atticus Finch persuades none of his twelve. Compare the two jury rooms and argue what makes reasoning work, or fail, among jurors.

Medical Lens

Mrs. Dubose's struggle is the novel's most clinical episode: the children find her in a daily fit, drooling and twitching, while an alarm clock signals the end of Jem's reading, and only after her death does Atticus explain that she had been taking morphine as a painkiller for years and resolved to die free of it, with the reading periods lengthening as she withdrew. It is a rare mid-century fictional portrait of opioid dependence and withdrawal in an elderly, terminally ill patient, framed as moral courage rather than disease. Tom Robinson's left arm, caught in a cotton gin at twelve and left shrunken and useless, is the physical fact that should acquit him. The mad dog Tim Johnson, shot in the street, shows the period's fear of rabies. Dolphus Raymond lets the town think he is a drunk, carrying Coca-Cola in a paper sack, to give them a reason for his way of life, and Bob Ewell's drinking runs through the Ewell household's misery. Dr. Reynolds sets Jem's badly broken elbow after the attack. Boo Radley's long seclusion is described through rumour, and any psychiatric reading of him is speculative.

• Chapter 11

  Jem reads to Mrs. Dubose through her fits; after her death Atticus reveals her fight to break her morphine addiction.

  Addiction Death Dying
• Chapter 10

  Calpurnia spots the mad dog Tim Johnson and Atticus shoots it in the street.

  Fever Infection
• Chapters 18-19

  Tom Robinson's crippled left arm, injured in a cotton gin, is shown to the court.

  Disability Deformity
• Chapter 20

  Dolphus Raymond shows the children that his paper sack holds only Coca-Cola.

  Alcohol
• Chapters 28-29

  Jem's arm is broken in the attack and Dr. Reynolds attends him.

  Physicians Doctors

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Hold a mock trial using only the evidence presented in Chapters 17-19, then discuss why the jury in Maycomb did not reach the verdict the evidence supports.

• Fiction

  Retell the night of the knothole gifts or the mended trousers from Boo Radley's side of the street.

• Essay

  Compare the courage of Atticus at the jail, Mrs. Dubose in her sickroom, and Scout before the mob. Which is closest to Atticus's own definition?

Further Reading

• Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee

  The earlier manuscript, published in 2015, set twenty years later.

• Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, Charles J. Shields

• Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, Dan T. Carter

• To Kill a Mockingbird, Horton Foote

  Screenplay of the 1962 film.