Summary: To Kill a Mockingbird

The GIST

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is a story about a small Southern town seen through the eyes of a child too young to know what she is not supposed to notice. Published on July 11, 1960, it is narrated by Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, who looks back on three years of her childhood in fictional Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression. In those years her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, defends a Black man accused of raping a white woman, and she and her brother grow obsessed with a neighbor nobody has seen in years. The first story is about injustice and the second is about fear, and Lee braids them into a single lesson about how to look at other people.

Lee's publisher warned her to expect sales of a few thousand copies, and she said she was hoping for a quick and merciful death from the reviewers. Instead the novel won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, has sold more than 30 million copies in more than 40 languages, and has never been out of print. It is the most widely read book in American high schools, Atticus has become a hero to generations of lawyers, and for all its hard subjects the book is loved for its warmth and humor. Lee drew it from life: her father was an Alabama attorney, the boy next door was the young Truman Capote, and a boarded-up house stood down her street in Monroeville.

The Story

Scout is six when the book opens, a scrappy girl who would sooner settle an argument with her fists than wear a dress. She lives with her older brother Jem and their widowed father, a middle-aged lawyer. Their mother died before Scout could remember her. The household is held together by Calpurnia, the Black cook who has been with the family for years and who helps raise the children with a firm hand. When Scout embarrasses a poorer classmate, Walter Cunningham, when he is a guest at the Finch home, it is Calpurnia who scolds and punishes her, and Atticus backs her.

Summer brings Dill, properly Charles Baker Harris, a small boy with a huge imagination who comes each year to stay with his aunt. The three become inseparable, and their great project is the Radley place. Somewhere inside that shuttered house lives Arthur "Boo" Radley, who has not been seen outside for many years. The adults avoid the subject. The children fill the silence with rumors about what he looks like and why he is hidden, act out lurid plays about his life, and dare each other to get close enough to draw him out.

Boo never appears. But someone begins leaving small presents in a tree outside the Radley place: trinkets and carved figurines. It dawns on Jem and Scout that the phantom they have been tormenting may be trying, shyly, to befriend them. Then Boo's older brother seals the hiding place, and the line of communication is cut.

The first part of the novel ambles through this neighborhood with great affection and a good deal of comedy. Scout's first day of school is a small satire: her teacher is dismayed that she can already read and orders her father to stop teaching her. Dill proposes marriage and then neglects her for Jem, and Scout's remedy is to beat him up. There is their strong-willed neighbor Miss Maudie, the ferocious old Mrs. Dubose who scolds Scout for not dressing like a girl, and the formidable Aunt Alexandra, who is determined to make a lady of her niece and explains everyone in town by their bloodlines. One Christmas the children get air rifles, and Atticus gives them the rule that supplies the title: shoot at bluejays if they must, but remember that "it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." Miss Maudie explains why. Mockingbirds harm nothing. "They don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us." And when a rabid dog appears in town, it is Atticus who waits on the deserted street to shoot it, though the job is not his.

Then Maycomb's deeper sickness comes into view. Judge Taylor appoints Atticus to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a young white woman from the poorest and least respected family in the county. Atticus intends to give him a real defense, and much of the town cannot forgive that. Scout and Jem are taunted at school with an ugly name for their father. Scout wants to fight for his honor; Atticus forbids it, which is harder for her than fighting. When Atticus is away, Calpurnia takes the children to her own church, and they glimpse for the first time the life she lives away from their kitchen, and the community that is praying for Tom.

One night before the trial, Atticus stands alone against a group of men who have come to lynch his client. Scout, Jem and Dill turn up unexpectedly in the middle of it. Scout does not understand what she is looking at. She simply recognizes one of the men as the father of a boy in her class and starts talking to him, heart to heart, as she would to any neighbor. Faced with a child who sees him as a neighbor rather than as part of a mob, the man cannot go on, and the crowd breaks up.

Atticus does not want his children at the trial, but they go anyway. The main floor is packed, so Reverend Sykes, the pastor of Calpurnia's church, takes them up to the balcony reserved for Black spectators. From there they watch their father question the witnesses, among them Mayella and her father, Bob Ewell. Piece by piece Atticus shows that the Ewells' story does not hold together, and that something quite different happened in that house. Scout, listening to Mayella, is struck most by how alone the girl is. The evidence is before the jury, poor white farmers of the county, and the children are certain they know what must happen next.

What the jury decides, what it costs the Finch family, and what part the unseen man in the Radley house finally plays are for the reader to discover.

What It's Really About

The most obvious theme is racial injustice, and for decades this was the most widely read American novel on the subject. Lee wrote it in the 1950s, as the civil rights movement was shaking Alabama, and set it twenty years earlier; scholars hear the tensions of both eras in it. But the book is also about class, the fine gradations between the Finches, the Cunninghams, who are poor but decent, the despised Ewells, who are just as poor and behave very differently, and the Black community of Calpurnia and Tom Robinson. Lee once said she wanted to be the Jane Austen of South Alabama, and like Austen she measures people by character instead of standing.

At its heart is a way of seeing. Atticus tells Scout that "you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb around in his skin and walk around in it," and the whole novel is her education in doing so, with Boo, with Mayella, with the bitter Mrs. Dubose. His definition of courage has nothing to do with guns. It is "when you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what." The mockingbird stands for the innocent and harmless, those whom it is a sin to destroy, and readers have attached it to more than one character.

It is a coming-of-age story twice over. Jem, older, feels the town's failures most painfully. Scout is working out what it means to be a girl in a place with rigid ideas on the matter, taking her models from strong-willed women such as Calpurnia and Miss Maudie. And much of its charm is the voice: an adult's memory poured through a child's eyes, funny and unsparing at once.

The book has critics. Some early reviewers doubted that a six-year-old could sound like this; Flannery O'Connor called it a child's book. Later writers have found Atticus too saintly and the Black characters too thinly drawn, and the novel has repeatedly been challenged in schools over its racial slurs. Others, like the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, praise Lee for treating racism as something that was never inevitable. The argument is part of why the book stays alive.

Who Should Read It

Nearly everyone, which is why British librarians once ranked it ahead of the Bible among books every adult should read. It is ideal for readers who love a strong narrator and a vivid sense of place, for anyone interested in law, conscience and the American South, and for those who read it at school and remember only the trial. Coming back as an adult, you may find the humor sharper and the sadness deeper than you recalled.