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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Chapter 10

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

• Chapters 18-19

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

• Chapter 20

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

• Chapters 28-29

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