Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird was published by J. B. Lippincott in Philadelphia on July 11, 1960. It is narrated by Jean Louise 'Scout' Finch, a girl in the small Alabama town of Maycomb in the 1930s. Her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, defends Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell. Scout and her brother Jem also become fascinated by their reclusive neighbor Boo Radley. The story covers a trial, a verdict and the cost of prejudice.¹

Harper Lee grew up in Monroeville, Alabama, where her father was a lawyer, and drew on her childhood. Her friend Truman Capote was the model for the character Dill. The Scottsboro trials of the 1930s, in which Black youths were convicted in Alabama on false charges of rape, are often cited as a background. The novel was written and revised with an editor, Tay Hohoff, in the late 1950s as the civil rights movement took shape.¹

It was a bestseller immediately and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. The 1962 film starring Gregory Peck won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. It has sold more than 40 million copies and is widely taught in American schools. Critics have also questioned its focus on a white savior, its limited Black voices and its use of racial slurs, and it has been challenged and removed from school lists. In 2015 Lee published Go Set a Watchman, an earlier manuscript that shows Atticus holding segregationist views, which divided readers. Lee died in 2016.¹²