To Kill a Mockingbird

Article written by Onyekachi Osuji

B.A. in Public Administration and certified in Creative Writing (Fiction and Non-Fiction)

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee begins with Scout Finch, who reminisces on events that took place in her hometown from when she was six years to nine years old. Scout, with her brother Jem, and their friend Dill undertake many childish ventures in a bid to unravel the phantom of a reclusive neighbor known as Boo Radley. As she grows older, Scout begins to see the sheer injustice of racial discrimination and prejudice in her society when her father Atticus Finch, who is a lawyer, defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Having seen what an unjust society they live in, the children begin to reason that perhaps Boo is right in shutting himself away from the world.

Key Facts about To Kill a Mockingbird

• Title: To Kill a Mockingbird
• Publication Year: 1960
• Number of Pages: 273
• Literary Period: Modern
• Genre: Bildungsroman
• Point of View: First-person Narration
• Setting: 1930s  Alabama, USA
• Climax: Boo Radley fends off Bob Ewell as he attacks Jem and Scout
• Protagonists: Scout; Atticus Finch
• Antagonists: Bob Ewell; the racist people of Maycomb County

Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird is the centerpiece of Harper Lee’s career as a novelist. It was her first novel, published in July 1960 when she was thirty-four years old, and was her only published novel for most of her life until July 2015, when she published a second novel at eighty-nine years old. The second novel was titled Go Set a Watchman and was an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, with some chapters of the two novels being the same.

Harper Lee was pursuing a Law degree at the University of Alabama but dropped out without obtaining the degree and moved to New York in 1949 to pursue a career as a writer. However, her move to New York was not without challenges, as she had to work to make ends meet and could only write in her spare time. For many years, Lee worked as a ticket reservation agent for an airline, which dampened her productivity as a writer. Then on the Christmas of 1956, Lee’s friends, Micheal Martin Brown, who was a Broadway composer and lyricist, and his wife Joy Brown gave Harper Lee a year’s worth of her wages as a Christmas gift with a note that read: ”You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas”.

Harper Lee promptly focused on her writing after receiving the gift, and by the spring of 1957, she had produced a manuscript that was sent to various publishers.  J.B Lippincott Company bought the manuscript, and a member of the company, Tay Hohoff began to work on the script as editor. In Hoff’s opinion, the script was more of a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel, and it took both author and editor about three years of dedicated hard work to restructure the script and produce the finished work that the world now knows as To Kill a Mockingbird. Within those years, Lee had despaired and almost given up on the script. It is said that she had once tossed the script out of the window on a winter night and had called her editor in tears. It is a good thing that Harper Lee did not give up on the script at the end because the novel became a gift to many readers and the world at large.

To Kill a Mockingbird earned its author Harper Lee the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961 and many other awards and recognition, including the Medal of Freedom from two presidents of the United States and appointment to the National Council on the Arts.

Harper Lee included numerous autobiographical details in To Kill a Mockingbird. The narrator Scout Finch had many similarities with Harper Lee as a child, the character Dill was based on Harper’s childhood friend Truman Capote, the morally upright lawyer Atticus Finch was based on Harper Lee’s father Amasa Coleman Lee, and many other characters in the To Kill a Mockingbird were based on real-life family, friends, and neighbors of Harper Lee. The fictional location of Maycomb County in To Kill a Mockingbird is based on Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

Although To Kill a Mockingbird was a bestseller that garnered public attention to the author, Harper Lee was reclusive and did not bask in the public attention. Asides from some interviews in the first few years after the publication, she turned down many requests to grant interviews and make public appearances and lived a relatively private life, shuttling between Manhattan New York, and her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

Books Related to To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is a novel that showcases many aspects of the culture of the Deep South in the United States—small-town lifestyle where everyone knows everyone else, men with an exaggerated sense of gallantry towards their women, social class distinctions and racial discrimination. Below are some other novels with similar qualities.

• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936). This historical novel by Margaret Mitchell narrates the struggles of a sheltered white girl Scarlett O’Hara as she witnesses the ordeals of the American Civil War and the new age of the Reconstruction Era in the southern state of Georgia, USA. It is similar to To Kill a Mockingbird in being a classic storytelling from a Southerner that depicts the class, gender, and racial discrimination in the South.
• Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote (1948). This Gothic novel was written by Truman Capote, who was Harper Lee’s close childhood friend. The protagonist of the novel is a 13-year-old boy named Joel Harrison Knox, whose life takes a new turn after the death of his mother. Joel moves to a new home rife with decay and strange appearances but finds friendship with a tomboy around his age called Idabel.

Other Voices, Other Rooms, and To Kill a Mockingbird both have children as major characters and are similar in addressing themes of childhood, coming of age, and parental dynamics, along with issues of gender and race. Both authors also modeled a character after each other in the two respective novels— Truman Capote modeled the character Idabel in Other Voices, Other Rooms after memories of Harper Lee as a child, and Harper Lee modeled the character Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird after Truman Capote as a child.

• Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee (2015). This is Harper Lee’s only published novel besides To Kill a Mockingbird. Go Set a Watchman is an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird submitted to publishers in 1957 but was published fifty-eight years later in 2015. Go Set A Watchman follows the later lives of characters in To Kill a Mockingbird as the South continues to face tensions around the issue of race and discrimination. Go Set a Watchman places controversies around the morally upright Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird. Scout Finch as a single lady in her twenties becomes disillusioned with her idolization of her father as she senses that like many other Southern men, her father might also have racial prejudice.

Lasting Impact of To Kill a Mockingbird