To Kill a Mockingbird

First published in 1960, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a quietly radical portrait of childhood, conscience and the injustices woven into everyday life in the American South. In the small Alabama town of Maycomb during the Depression, young Scout Finch and her brother Jem spend their days exploring, inventing games and puzzling over their mysterious neighbour, Boo Radley. Their sheltered world begins to change when their father, Atticus Finch, a principled lawyer, agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of assaulting a white woman. Through Scout’s observant, often wry narration, Lee brings the rituals, prejudices and contradictions of a Southern community into sharp and affecting focus.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, Lee’s only novel published during her lifetime became one of the defining works of twentieth-century American literature. Its enduring power lies in the tension between a child’s instinctive sense of fairness and the moral failures of the adult world, as well as its exploration of courage, empathy, class and racial injustice. Both a coming-of-age story and a searching examination of conscience, the novel balances tenderness and humour with an unflinching account of a society shaped by segregation. Its place in the literary canon remains significant, inviting generations of readers to consider what justice demands when prejudice is sanctioned by the community.

From the book

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

On To Kill a Mockingbird

“The novel is an account of an awakening to good and evil.”

— TIME, original review, 1960