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Novel

• To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

Periodical Publications

• “Love—In Other Words.” Vogue 15 April 1961: 64-5.
• “Christmas to Me.” McCalls Dec. 1961: 63.

Harper Lee’s cousin, Richard Williams, has asked the reclusive author when she’s going to come out with another book. “And she said, ‘Richard, when you’re at the top, there’s only one way to go’” (Pressley).

For Harper Lee, “the top” is her novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and was made into an Academy Award–winning film, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, in 1962. Except for a couple of short magazine pieces, this single novel constitutes her entire literary output.

Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, in 1926. After a year (1944-1945) at Huntington College in Montgomery, she went to the University of Alabama to study law. She remained at Alabama, including a year as an exchange student at Oxford University, from 1945 to 1949. She left the university six months before completing her law degree to go to New York City to become a writer.

In New York she began to write while working as an airline reservation clerk. At the urging of a literary agent, she concentrated on expanding one of her short stories into a novel. In 1957 she took her manuscript to the publishing company Lippincott, where editors saw promise in her work and encouraged her to continue to revise it. The manuscript eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960.

Since the early 1960s Harper Lee has declined to give interviews and has avoided publicity. She was asked to write an introduction for the 35th-anniversary edition of Mockingbird but declined. In 1991 she made a rare public appearance to accept an honorary degree from the University of Alabama. She now divides her time between Monroeville and New York.

There are many autobiographical elements in To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus Finch is based on Lee’s own father, Amasa, a lawyer, and the narrator Scout is apparently modeled after Lee herself as a child. The fictional town of Maycomb re-creates the author’s hometown of Monroeville. Pressley says that the town’s old courthouse now draws 20,000 visitors a year and that “the old town square she explored barefoot and in overalls still stands, with the red-brick courthouse with the clock chimes and the hardware stores.”

Johnson (13) says  that a recent study of best-sellers found that, between 1895 and 1975, To Kill a Mockingbird was the seventh best-selling book in the United States, and the third best-selling novel. And a 1991 “Survey of Lifetime Reading Habits” conducted by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book found that “among the books mentioned by its 5,000 respondents, Harper Lee’s TKM was second only to the Bible in being ‘most often cited as making a difference’ in people’s lives” (Johnson, 14). The novel has become a staple of junior high and high school English classes.

I think the reason To Kill a Mockingbird is so popular in literature classes is that, although complex, it’s not at all subtle. Harper Lee’s text provides splendid passages for teaching about literary techniques like imagery, irony, and symbolism. For example, when Atticus Finch says that Tom Robinson’s case is “as simple as black and white” (203), we know exactly what he means. The story also appeals to students because it’s a story of growing up for both Jem and, to a lesser extent, Scout.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
rpt. Warner, 1982, 281 pages, $6.99 paperback, ISBN 0-446-31078-6

The story takes place in rural Maycomb, Alabama, between the summer of 1933 and Halloween of 1935. In Part One the young narrator, Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, sets the stage for the main action by introducing us to life in her small town, where the farmers have been hit hard by the Depression. We meet Scout’s brother, Jem; her father, lawyer Atticus Finch, whom the children address by his first name; and the family’s black cook, Calpurnia. We also meet Dill, a boy who spends summers with his aunt, the Finches’ next-door neighbor. Scout is almost six years old when the story begins, her brother almost 10.

The novel employs a first-person narrator. This narrator is not the young child telling the story as it happens, but rather an adult remembering events of her childhood. This technique allows the older narrator to present herself whenever necessary to supply information that the child narrator could not have known at the time or to comment on the action.

Scout, Jem, and Dill spend most of their first two summers together devising elaborate schemes to lure their neighbor, Boo Radley, out of his spooky house.

Part Two presents the central action of the novel, the trial of Tom Robinson, in summer, 1935. Bob Ewell, a shiftless and dishonest alcoholic whose family lives in a run-down old shack behind the garbage dump, accuses Tom Robinson, a black man, of raping his daughter Mayella. The town judge has assigned Atticus to defend Tom. Despite Atticus’s upstanding reputation, his neighbors have been hurling offensive remarks about him at his children because of his efforts to defend a black man.

The night before the trial Scout, Jem, and Dill watch Atticus confront a lynch mob in front of the town jail, where Tom Robinson is being held. The cowardly mob disperses when the three children appear and Scout begins talking to one of the men she knows.

After the jury delivers the verdict that everyone knows is a foregone conclusion, Bob Ewell, who feels that Atticus humiliated him on the witness stand, vows to get even. In the story’s dramatic climax, Jem and Scout are attacked on their way home from a Halloween pageant at the school. They are saved by the appearance of a man who carries the unconscious Jem home.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a double coming-of-age story involving both Jem and, to a lesser degree, Scout. In a way the novel is also a coming-of-age story about southern culture as it takes its first small step toward emerging from its racist past.

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