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Overview
At the age of eight, Scout Finch is an entrenched free-thinker. She can accept her father's warning that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, because mockingbirds harm no one and give great pleasure. The benefits said to be gained from going to school and keeping her temper elude her.
The place of this enchanting, intensely moving story is Maycomb, Alabama. The time is the Depression, but Scout and her brother, Jem, are seldom depressed. They have appalling gifts for entertaining themselves—appalling, that is, to almost everyone except their wise lawyer father, Atticus.
Atticus is a man of unfaltering good will and humor, and partly because of this, the children become involved in some disturbing adult mysteries: fascinating Boo Radley, who never leaves his house; the terrible temper of Mrs. Dubose down the street; the fine distinctions that make the Finch family "quality"; the forces that cause the people of Maycomb to show compassion in one crisis and unreasoning cruelty in another.
Also because Atticus is what he is, and because he lives where he does, he and his children are plunged into a conflict that indelibly marks their lives—and gives Scout some basis for thinking she knows just about as much about the world as she needs to.
Winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Fiction.
Synopsis
Published in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's only novel, won instant popular success and became an international bestseller. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, and has since been translated into forty languages. Yet, despite its tremendous commercial success, the critical response to the novel has been mixed, and the book has often fallen prey to censorship. Nevertheless, To Kill a Mockingbird remains one of the most universally read books in the United States and continues to impact new generations of readers across the world.