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281. To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in June 1960 and became instantly successful. In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill a Mockingbird has become a classic of modern American literature; a year after its release, it won the Pulitzer Prize.
- Harper Lee
- 1960
Dill Harris. Charles Baker "Dill" Harris is a short, smart boy who visits Maycomb every summer from Meridian, Mississippi and stays with his Aunt Rachel (Aunt Stephanie in the film). Dill is the best friend of both Jem and Scout, and his goal throughout the novel is to get Boo Radley to come out of his house.
Analysis: Chapters 12–13. Dill’s absence from Maycomb coincides appropriately with the continued encroachment of the adult world upon Scout’s childhood, as Dill has represented the perspective of childhood throughout the novel. Scout’s journey to Calpurnia’s church is the reader’s first glimpse of the Black community in Maycomb ...
Setting. To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in Maycomb, Alabama during 1933–1935. These years place the events of the novel squarely within two important periods of American history: the Great Depression and the Jim Crow era. The Great Depression is reflected in the poverty that affects all of the residents of Maycomb.
- Truman Capote and Harper Lee were childhood friends. Author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, Truman Capote grew up with Lee in the depression era South.
- She worked on a true crime novel. Like her friend Capote, Lee also had a proclivity for true crime. Rev. Willie Maxwell, a preacher in Alexander City, Alabama, allegedly murdered five family members and in a strange twist of events, was himself murdered publicly at the funeral of one of the family members.
- She won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded Harper Lee the Medal of Freedom for the social contributions she made by writing To Kill a Mockingbird.
- She is one of many authors with a banned book. To Kill a Mockingbird was first banned in 1966 by a school board in Hanover County, Virginia, because of claims that it was “immoral literature.”
Analysis: Chapters 9–11. The fire in which the previous section culminated represents an important turning point in the narrative structure of To Kill a Mockingbird. Before the fire, the novel centers on Scout’s childhood world, the games that she plays with Jem and Dill, and their childhood superstitions about Boo Radley.
Cecil Jacobs is a young boy Scout’s age who is a product of his racist environment. Cecil shows that racism is a learned behavior when he makes fun of Atticus for defending Tom Robinson in front ...
