To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee’s Coming-of-Age Classic of Conscience in the American South
An unforgettable novel of childhood in a quiet Southern town and the crisis of conscience that shook it. To Kill a Mockingbird became an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Oscar-winning film, itself a classic. Harper Lee always thought of her book as a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.
Author: Harper Lee (1926–2016)
Title: To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
Format: English paperback (Random House UK), 320 pages
Awards: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1961
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/1784752630 (ASIN 1784752630)
A Novel of Growing Up
Compassionate, dramatic and deeply moving, the novel takes readers to the roots of human behaviour: innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humour and pathos. It is also a coming-of-age novel, in which a character passes from childhood towards maturity and learns about life through particular events. In this sense its central theme is Scout’s loss of innocence as she faces the trial and its aftermath, up to the attack by Bob Ewell and his death. The story also clearly has an autobiographical background.
Atticus Finch and Doing What Is Right
The book is about Atticus Finch, an unconventional hero and role model because of his morality rather than his physical abilities. Morality runs through the whole novel, especially in relation to religion and the idea of sin. Take Mrs Dubose, a morphine addict trying to break her habit: she means to leave this world beholden to nothing and nobody, pursuing her own dream of being free because she knows deep down that it is right.
The novel centres on that instinct for right and wrong and distinguishes it from simply obeying the law. Even the title line, ’Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird’, is an allegory of this message. What ’doing the right thing’ means depends on when and where you read the book. In 1960, the United States was going through a slow ethical awakening, as social inequality was very gradually being overcome and the civil rights and women’s movements were beginning to rise.
Why the Mockingbird?
The title comes from a scene in which Atticus gives his children air rifles and tells them they may shoot all the bluejays they want, but that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird. Their neighbour Miss Maudie explains: mockingbirds do nothing but make music for us to enjoy. The image comes back at the end of the novel, applied to characters who have done no harm and are destroyed or threatened by others, notably Tom Robinson, the Black man falsely accused of rape whom Atticus defends, and the reclusive neighbour Boo Radley.
Monroeville and Truman Capote
Harper Lee grew up in Monroeville, Alabama, where her father was a lawyer, and the fictional Maycomb is closely based on it. Scout’s friend Dill is modelled on Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote, who spent summers next door; years later Lee helped Capote with the research for In Cold Blood. Gregory Peck won the Oscar for best actor for playing Atticus in Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film. In 2015 an earlier manuscript, Go Set a Watchman, was published, in which an older Scout finds that her father holds segregationist views; it is best read as a draft rather than a sequel.
Style
It is a book with so many layers of meaning that you can get a great deal out of it. It is written in simple, clear, clean language, which may be why it is a favourite of young readers. It is told in the first person from Scout’s point of view rather than by an omniscient narrator, and it uses flashback, breaking the chronological order of the story.
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