One of the most beloved novels of all time, “To Kill a Mockingbird” is the story of Scout Finch, a six-year-old girl being raised by Atticus, her widowed father, along with Jem, her ten-year-old brother. They have a housekeeper, Calpurnia, who keeps them on the straight and narrow most of the time, and these children have a secure foundation which puts them in good stead to weather some of the trials they’re going to face during the course of the story.
It all begins, really, with Boo Radley. The Radley house is just down the street from the Finches, and no one has seen Mrs. Radley or the adult son, Arthur (called Boo) for years. Mr. Radley comes and goes at the same time each morning, presumably picking up groceries and whatever else the inhabitants of the house need, but Boo never looks outside. In his thirties now, he’s rumored to be insane, and he’s also rumored to have stabbed his father in the leg with a pair of scissors. The children of the neighborhood blame him whenever anything goes missing, and they say he’s a boogie man who comes out to peer in people’s windows, but Atticus sternly tells them to leave Boo alone and stop making up stories about him.
Atticus has some problems of his own. A lawyer, he’s been asked to defend Tom Robinson, a black man who has been accused of raping a white girl. This being in the 1940s and the book taking place in the south, the race issues make this a no-win situation for Atticus. He’s being harassed for taking the case, he’ll be more harassed if he wins, but he knows he can’t possibly win because everyone on the jury is prejudiced. Still, he wants to do his very best by Tom, who he knows to be innocent. Atticus knows he’s fighting a battle he can’t win, but he fights it anyway.
After the trial, the father of the girl in question decides to make the Finch’s life miserable and pesters them, eventually coming after the children in the climax of the book. They are saved in a most remarkable way, leaving the story with a tinge of hope and happiness after all.
This book is beautifully written, making me wonder why this was Harper Lee’s only book. If she’d written more, I’d buy every single one of them. Her use of language, her evocative word choices – this is an absolute masterpiece of literature and took the Pulitzer Prize in 1961.
(This book was first published in 1960.)
Related Blogs:
To Kill a Mockingbird: A Classic Tale
Gregory Peck: A Classic Man Among Men