To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird

File:Mockingbirdfirst.JPG
Author	Harper Lee
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Southern Gothic semi-autobiographical novel
Publisher	HarperCollins
Publication date	July 11, 1960
Media type	Print (Hardback and Paperback)
Pages	336 pp (Hardcover 40th Anniversary edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-06-019499-5 (Hardcover 40th Anniversary edition)

To Kill a Mockingbird is a Southern Gothic novel by Harper Lee in the bildungsroman genre. Published in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. It is taught in approximately 74% of schools in the United States. A 1991 survey by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress' Center for the Book found that To Kill a Mockingbird came in second after the Bible in books "most often cited as making a difference."

The novel is loosely based on the lives of various friends and members of the author's family, but with differing character names. Lee has acknowledged that the character Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, who serves as the novel's narrator, is based on herself.

To Kill a Mockingbird contains many themes such as selfishness, hatred, courage, pride, prejudice, and life's many stages, set against a backdrop of life in the Deep South. The book was successfully adapted for film by director Robert Mulligan with a screenplay by Horton Foote in 1962. To date, it is Lee's only published novel.

Explanation of the novel's title

After giving his children air-rifles as Christmas presents, Atticus warns them that, although they can "shoot all the bluejays they want," they must remember that "it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." Miss Maudie Atkinson, the children's neighbor, later explains that it is a sin because mockingbirds do no harm. They only provide pleasure with their songs: "They don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us." The mockingbird is used as a recurring motif to symbolize the innocence of various victims of injustice throughout the novel.

Background

In 1957, Nelle Harper Lee was working for British Overseas Air Corporation as a reservation clerk in New York City. She approached a literary agent referred by her childhood friend Truman Capote, with several essays and short stories about people in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. An editor at J. B. Lippincott advised her to quit the airline and concentrate on her writing, and a gift from friends made it possible for her to write for a year without working a full-time job.

The novel is a thinly disguised partial autobiography. Lee's father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was an attorney and editor and publisher of the Monroeville newspaper. She had a brother, Edwin, four years her senior. A black housekeeper came once a day to take care of the house and family. Her mother was prone to a nervous condition and if not physically absent, was mentally and emotionally absent. Capote, the boy who lived next door to her (who was named Truman Persons then), had a gift for fascinating stories and they were very good friends; his mother sent him to live with aunts when she went to New York City. Both were atypical children: Lee loved to read and was a scrappy tomboy quick to fight, and she and Capote acted out and made up stories together. Capote called them "apart people."

Down the street from the Lees lived a family whose house was always boarded up. The son of the family got into some legal trouble and the father kept him at home for 24 years until he was virtually forgotten by everyone he knew, ruining his life for the shame he brought upon the family. He died in 1952.

When Lee was 10 years old, a white woman near Monroeville accused a black man of raping her. The story and the trial were covered by her father's newspaper. The black man was convicted, sent to prison, and eventually was committed to a mental institution where he died in 1937. Although the Scottsboro Boys incident occurred when she was six years old and would also be covered by her father's paper, Lee stated that she had in mind something less sensational than that, although it served the same purpose to show Southern attitudes about prejudice.

Her father defended two black men in 1919 accused of murder. He was inexperienced and they were convicted, hanged, and mutilated. He never tried another criminal case. A.C. Lee was not as liberal as Atticus in terms of racial relations throughout his entire life, but became so gradually.

Nelle Harper Lee attended Hundingdon College and the University of Alabama, writing for the campus literary magazines: Huntress at Hundingdon and Rammer Jammer, a humor magazine at the University of Alabama. At both schools, she wrote short stories and pieces about racial injustice, and at both schools the themes of her pieces were extraordinarily rare. She attended the University of Alabama until 1948, when she dropped out of law school. In 1955, when Lee was living in New York City and compiling her stories of the people in her hometown, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in Montgomery, sparking the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 1956 in Tuscaloosa, Autherine Lucy and Pollie Ann Myers were granted admission into the University of Alabama, which caused mass hysteria on campus. Lucy was expelled, and Myers withdrew her application under pressure. Both of these events, occurring so close to Lee's own personal history, made national news, reported widely in newspapers and television.

Lee worked on the book for two and a half years, initially titling it Atticus, but changing the title to match the overall themes beyond a character portrait. The editorial team at Lippincott tried to warn Lee that she would probably sell several thousand copies at the most.

Reader's Digest and Condensed Books published portions of the novel which gave it a wide readership almost immediately. The first edition of the novel included a recommendation by Truman Capote (and later fueled rumors that he wrote the novel, edited or contributed to it heavily).

Plot summary

The story takes place during the Great Depression over a span of three years. The narrator is 6-year-old Scout Finch who lives with her brother Jem and their father Atticus, who is a middle-aged lawyer in Maycomb County, Alabama. Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Dill, who has come to live with their neighbor for the summer. They are terrified and fascinated by a phantom neighbor named "Boo" Radley, who is a mysterious recluse the adults are hesitant to speak about, and few have seen for years. They feed each other's imaginations with rampant rumor about his grotesque appearance and his reasons for remaining a recluse, and dream of ways to get him to emerge from his house.

Scout and Jem find that someone has been leaving them token gifts in a tree, and the phantom Boo makes several unseen appearances to the children displaying various gestures of affection. Scout and Jem appraise their small town neighbors through the eyes of children, and with Atticus' guidance not to judge others until they have walked around in someone else's shoes, discover many instances of quiet strength and dignity in the unlikeliest people.

Atticus is assigned to defend a black man named Tom Robinson, who has been accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a young white woman. To the consternation of many of Maycomb's citizens, however, he intends to defend Tom to the best of his ability, and Jem and Scout are subjected to the taunts from other children, whom Scout is tempted to fight against Atticus' orders. Atticus, in his part, faces a group of men intending to lynch Tom, but escapes the situation with the unwitting help of Scout, Jem, and Dill.

When the trial of Tom Robinson comes, Scout, Jem and Dill watch secretly from the colored balcony. Atticus shows that the accusers, Mayella Ewell and her father, the town drunk Bob Ewell, are lying: it was the friendless Mayella who was making sexual advances towards Tom, and was caught by her father. Despite the significant evidence pointing to Tom's innocence, he is convicted. Jem's faith in justice is badly shaken as is Atticus' when a hopeless Tom later tries to escape from prison and is shot and killed.

Bob Ewell feels humiliated by the trial and vows revenge. He menaces Tom Robinson's widow, tries to break into the judge's house, spits in Atticus' face on a town street, and finally attacks Jem and Scout as they walk home from a Halloween pageant at their school. Jem's arm is broken trying to escape with Scout, but in the dark someone has come to their rescue and carries Jem home where Scout sees later it is their reclusive friend Boo Radley. Maycomb's sheriff discovers Bob Ewell has been killed, and argues with Atticus about the prudence of giving Boo the credit for it. Boo asks Scout to walk him home, where he disappears again. While standing on the Radley porch, Scout imagines the past three years' events from Boo's perspective and regrets they never repaid him for the gifts that he had given them.

Characters

Main article: Characters in To Kill a Mockingbird

• Jean Louise "Scout" Finch - the novel's narrator who tells the story both as a grown woman reflecting on her childhood and as a child. Her childhood innocence is used to ask Atticus and other adults about illogical and hypocritical prejudices which exist in the town.
• Jeremy Atticus "Jem" Finch - Scout's older brother who is her playmate at the start, but as the novel progresses he matures, and by the end is very similar to Atticus in many ways, although he has only just become a teenager.
• Atticus Finch - Scout's father, and the lawyer who defends Tom Robinson. He is shown to have very high moral standards and retains his integrity by maintaining these values in all situations, no matter what the consequences.
• Calpurnia - the Finches' black housekeeper, who although she is a servant, is treated as a member of the family by the Finches, unusual in the racist society that the book is set in.
• Charles Baker "Dill" Harris - a friend of Jem and Scout. Neglected by his mother, he spends time with various relatives, including his Aunt Rachel in Maycomb in summer, which is how he befriends Scout and Jem. He is very small for his age, and is shown to have an impressive imagination.
• Mayella Violet Ewell - the young woman who accuses Tom Robinson of rape. Although in reality she had fallen in love with him and embraced him, prompting her father's violent outburst, she was forced by Bob Ewell to lie under oath and testify that Tom Robinson had beaten and raped her.
• Robert "Bob" Ewell - the father of Mayella, the parasitic town drunk, and apparently the only character with no redeeming qualities. After making several threats towards Atticus, he is killed by Arthur "Boo" Radley in the climax of the novel, in the act of attempting to murder Jem and Scout to get revenge on Atticus for his role in the court case.
• Tom Robinson - the black man accused of raping Mayella Ewell. He only has the use of his right hand, as his left arm is crippled from a childhood accident. Although Atticus establishes his innocence, he is nevertheless convicted and is later shot dead attempting to escape jail.
• Arthur "Boo" Radley - a shy recluse who is kind to the children. At various points throughout the novel he reaches out to them in small acts of kindness, and ultimately saves their lives by confronting and killing Bob Ewell, who planned to murder them.

Themes

The first noted motif in To Kill a Mockingbird is the witnessing of complex life disappointments often bordering on evils, seen and attempted to be understood through the eyes of children. Reviewers noted two separate parts of the book, and opinion was mixed as to how well Lee was able to tie the parts together. The first part deals with the children's fascination with Boo Radley and how they felt safe and comfortable in their neighborhood. Reviewers were generally charmed by Scout and Jem's observations of their quirky neighbors. So impressed was one reviewer by Lee's detailed explanations of the people of Maycomb, that the book's major theme was labeled as Southern romanticism. The Southern caste system is used to explain almost every character's behavior in the novel, to the point that The South itself, with its traditions and taboos, seems to affect the plot more than the characters or the action.

The second part deals with the shocking ugliness of Tom Robinson's trial and his subsequent death. In 1960 and the years that followed immediately after, many reviewers considered To Kill a Mockingbird a Southern Gothic novel primarily concerned with race relations, and these reviewers expressed the most doubt that children as sheltered as Scout and Jem could understand the complexities and horrors involved in the trial of Tom Robinson's life. When the book is viewed only as a moral tale of a Southern liberal defending a black man accused of raping a white woman, emotions of readers run high. The book has been challenged in schools and libraries since its publication. One of the first incidents of its being challenged in Hanover, Virginia in 1966 for being immoral (a parent initially protested the use of rape as a plot point). A reviewer illustrated these high emotions with examples of letters to the editor of the local newspapers that ranged from amusement to fury, and the letters that expressed the most outrage alluded to the disturbing aspects of race over rape.

More than one reviewer noted that "mockingbirds" are mentioned several times throughout the novel (that the family's last name is Finch is not a coincidence: it was Lee's mother's maiden name, but fit fully with the motif of songbirds as symbols), and usually when Lee was trying to make a moral point. Tom Robinson certainly is the embodiment of the innocent destroyed by carelessness or deliberation, but when the reader begins to note the many times mockingbirds are mentioned, Tom becomes one of many innocents in the novel who are affected by carelessness in varying degrees. By using children who must face hard realities in a cruel world, the book becomes more of a bildungsroman than a Southern Gothic. Lee uses the death of innocence (and innocents) in so many instances that one reviewer claimed it is inevitable that all the characters have faced or will face defeat, and the theme of the story becomes tragedy. And in reading how each character deals or has dealt with his or her own personal defeat, Lee builds a framework to judge if the characters are heroes or fools, and she assists her readers using unabashed adoration and biting irony, respectively.

Harper Lee remains famously detached from interpreting the novel, and has since the mid 1960s. However, she gave what little insight into her themes that she could, when in a rare response to the Hanover, Virginia immorality debate, Lee herself wrote a letter to the editor stating, "Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners."

Literary significance and criticism

One year after initial publication, To Kill a Mockingbird had been translated into 10 languages. By 1982, over 15 million copies of the book had been sold. By 1992, 18 million copies of the book in paperback alone had been sold. The book has never been out of print in hardcover or paperback. It has sold over 30 million copies and been translated into over 40 languages since first being published.

To Kill a Mockingbird appeared first on a list developed by librarians in 2006 who answered the question, "Which book should every adult read before they die?" followed by the Bible and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Over the years, To Kill a Mockingbird has become part of the standard canon of literature taught in schools. It was voted the "Best Novel of the 20th century" by readers of the Library Journal in 1999. It is listed as #5 on the Modern Library's Reader's List of the 100 Best Novels in the English language since 1900, and #4 on the rival Radcliffe Publishing Course's 100 Best Board Picks for Novels and Nonfiction.

When it first appeared, The Atlantic Monthly's reviewer rated it as "pleasant, undemanding reading," but found the narrative voice ("a six-year-old girl with the prose style of a well-educated adult") to be implausible. Overall, though, critical response was enthusiastic as the book's ethical themes had an obvious relevance to current events in American race relations. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961 and adapted into a critically-acclaimed film in 1962.

Time Magazine included To Kill a Mockingbird on its 100 Best English Novels from 1923 to the Present list in 2005. Their 1960 review of the book states that it, "teaches the reader an astonishing number of useful truths about little girls and about Southern life" and calls Scout Finch, "the most appealing child since Carson McCullers' Frankie got left behind at the wedding."

The book's use of racial slurs, profanity, and frank discussion of rape has led to it being challenged in libraries and classrooms. The American Library Association reported that To Kill a Mockingbird was #41 of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990-2000, and cites several cases from that period and earlier of the book being challenged or banned.

To Kill a Mockingbird was listed as #64 of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels by the Publishing Triangle.

Atticus Finch as lawyer-hero

The book's impact on the legal profession cannot be underestimated. Atticus Finch stands as the first model of a lawyer-hero, in direct contrast to the popular depiction of lawyers as unscrupulous and models of greed. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center has acknowledged Atticus Finch to be the reason he became a lawyer, as well as Richard Matsch, the federal judge who presided over the Timothy McVeigh trial. One law professor at the University of Notre Dame stated the most influential textbook he taught from was To Kill a Mockingbird. An Alabama editorial in 1992 called for the death of Atticus, symbolizing that as liberal as Atticus was, he still worked within a system of institutionalized racism and sexism and should not be revered. The editorial sparked a flurry of responses from attorneys who entered the profession holding Atticus Finch as a hero, and the reason they became lawyers. In 1997, the Alabama Bar Association erected a monument dedicated to Atticus in Monroeville marking his existence as the "first commemorative milestone in the state's judicial history."

In a 1961 interview, Lee herself described Atticus as "a man of absolute integrity with as much good will and good humor as he is just and humane." Praise for the character is tremendous indeed, likening him to the "Abe Lincoln of Alabama," Emersonian in his wisdom, and a modern-day prophet. The American Film Institute voted Atticus Finch the greatest film hero in movie history, and Gregory Peck acknowledged Atticus to be the greatest role he ever played.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

The book was made into the well-received and Academy Award-winning film with the same title, starring Gregory Peck in 1962.

This book has also been adapted as a play by Christopher Sergel. It debuted in Monroeville in 1990.

After publication

Film producer Alan J. Pakula with Lee watching the filming

Despite the initial warnings her editors gave to Lee that the book might not sell well, To Kill a Mockingbird was a sensation. It made Lee very famous and quite wealthy (compared to her income prior to its release) in a very short period of time. During the years immediately after the book was published, Lee enjoyed the attention the book got and granted interviews and visits to schools and other groups. Although it earned some editorials lamenting the use of backwards poor white Southerners, and one dimensional black victims, it was very well received in her hometown and throughout Alabama. Despite the novel's release at the same time racial injustice was being confronted in Alabama, the subject of racial justice in a novel was not new or different. The same year To Kill a Mockingbird came out, so did Seed in the Wind by Leon Odell Griffith. Griffith's book paled in comparison to Lee's success, despite both books' subjects being similar.

The movie featured two children native to Birmingham and debuted there in 1963 with much excitement. There was a notable disconnect, however, as it played on and was being nominated for multiple Oscars during Civil Rights actions in Birmingham, when police were reacting to nonviolent school-aged marchers with fire hoses. These events also made a tremendous impact upon the nation and the world when they were filmed and shown on television.

The novel's release ties in so closely with the Civil Rights movement that most analyses of the book and biographies of Harper Lee include important moments in the movement, despite her having no direct involvement in any of them. Some literary interpretations suggest the novel spoke the opinion of millions of white Americans who sympathized with the black struggle for equality, and that the Civil Rights movement is responsible for the success of the novel, and the novel a part of the success of the movement as a whole.

Around 1965, Lee began to turn down interviews, noting that the questions were all the same. She started a second novel but was so busy promoting the film and giving interviews that she did not have time she wanted to work on it. Lee and Truman Capote drifted apart due to his feelings about her winning the Pulitzer Prize, and when In Cold Blood was released in 1965, Lee was not recognized for her efforts in assisting Capote in writing the book; she had traveled with him to Kansas and acted as a research assistant for him. Their friendship continued until his death in 1984, tentative, as Capote battled his addictions.

In 1970, her editor at Lippincott died, and Lee was deeply affected by his loss. In 1974 the literary agent she first approached in 1957 also died. Almost everyone who had supported her writing efforts while she was creating To Kill a Mockingbird, and helped her wade through the attention and publicity it received was no longer in the business. Her second novel, that she had been working on for so long was stolen in the mid 1970s.

Lee continues to refuse interviews about her life and the book.

See also

• Southern literature
• Maycomb
• To Kill a Mockingbird in popular culture

External links

• Study resource for writing about To Kill a Mockingbird
• Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields, 2006
• Photos of the first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird
• NovelGuide: To Kill a Mockingbird