TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

'''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 somewhat based on herself.^[1]
''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.

Contents

Explanation of the novel's title

Background

Plot summary

Characters

Themes

Literary significance and criticism

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

Release details

See also

References

External links

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 to 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.
Lee worked on the book for months, initially titling it ''Atticus'', 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 or edited it 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, 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 Robinson, 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 of the book's events from Boo's perspective and regrets they never repaid him for the gifts that he had given them.

Characters

Main articles: Characters in To Kill a Mockingbird


★ Jean Louise "Scout" Finch - the novel's narrator who tells the story as a grown woman reflecting on her childhood, and as a child. We see the world of Maycomb from her point of view, and her childhood innocence is used to expose the 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. ^[2][3] 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 'romanticism'.^[4] 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 incidence 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), and usually when Lee was trying to make a moral point.^[5] 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'.^[6] 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."^[7]

Literary significance and criticism

One year after initial publication, ''To Kill A Mockingbird'' had been translated into 10 languages. The book has never been out of print in hardcover or paperback. 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.^[8] It has sold over 30 million copies and been translated into over 40 languages since first being published.
''To Kill A Mockingbird'' was 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. ^[9]
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,^[10] and #4 on the rival Radcliffe Publishing Course's 100 Best Board Picks for Novels and Nonfiction.^[11]
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.^[12] 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." ^[13]
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^[14], and cites several cases from that period and earlier of the book being challenged or banned^[15].
''To Kill A Mockingbird'' was listed as #64 of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels by the Publishing Triangle. ^[16]

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

The book was made into the well-received and Academy Award-winning film, starring Gregory Peck, with the same title, ''To Kill a Mockingbird'', in 1962.
This book has also been adapted as a play by Christopher Sergel.

Release details

★ 1960, USA, J.B. Lippincott ISBN 0397001517, Pub date July 11, 1960, Hardcover

★ 1999, USA, HarperCollins ISBN ISBN 0060194995, Pub date December 1, 1999, Hardcover

See also

★ Southern literature

★ Maycomb

★ To Kill a Mockingbird in popular culture

References

1. Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, , Charles, Shields, Henry Holt and Co., 2006,
2. LeMay, Harding. "Children Play; Adults Betray." From ''New York Herald Tribune Book Review'', July 10 1960.
3. Hicks, Granville. "Three at the Outset." From Saturday Review XLIII:30, July 23, 1960
4. Erisman, Fred. "The Romantic Regionalism of Harper Lee." The Alabama Review XXVI:2, April, 1973.
5. Schuster, Edgar. "Discovering Theme and Structure in the Novel." ''English Journal'' 52:7, 1963
6. Dave, R.A. "Harper Lee's Tragic Vision." Indian Studies in American Fiction. MacMillan Company of India, Ltd., 1974.
7. Lee, Harper. Letter to the Editor. ''Richmond News-Leader'', January 15, 1966.
8. Johnson, Claudia. ''Understanding To Kill A Mockingbird: A Student Casebook to Issues.'' Greenwood Press, 1994.
9. http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1721526,00.html
10. http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html
11. http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100rivallist.html
12. Adams, Phoebe (August 1960) "A Review". ''Atlantic Monthly''.
13. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,869711,00.html?internalid=atb100
14. 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000
15. Banned and/or Challenged Books
16. http://www.publishingtriangle.org/100best.asp

External links

★ Publishing History of To Kill a Mockingbird

★ 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