To Kill a Mockingbird

• 1. Introduction

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  To Kill a Mockingbird, the 1960 novel by Harper Lee, has sold more than 30 million copies and appeared in more than 40 languages. The editorial team at her publisher had warned her to expect only several thousand buyers. In 2006, British librarians ranked it ahead of the Bible as a book every adult should read before they die. Yet Lee never chased the spotlight. For most of her life it was the only book she published, and in 1964 she gave her last interview to a journalist.

  How does a manuscript its first editor called a string of anecdotes become a fixture of classrooms on two continents? Who were the real neighbors, relatives and criminal trials hiding inside a fictional Alabama town? And why does a story so many readers treat as a moral compass keep getting pulled off school reading lists?

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• 2. Anecdotes Into Novel

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  Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. She studied at Huntingdon College in Montgomery in 1944-45, then read law at the University of Alabama until 1949. For the campus literary magazines she wrote stories about racial injustice, a subject rarely mentioned at those schools. In 1950 she moved to New York City and took a job as a reservation clerk for British Overseas Airways Corporation. After work she started on essays and stories about the people of Monroeville.

  In 1957, she showed her writing to a literary agent recommended by her childhood friend Truman Capote. An editor at J. B. Lippincott bought the manuscript and urged her to quit the airline. Gifts from friends then paid for a full year of uninterrupted writing. The first draft carried the title Go Set a Watchman.

  It landed on the desk of Therese von Hohoff Torrey, known professionally as Tay Hohoff. She saw talent. Later, in a corporate history of Lippincott, she wrote that "the spark of the true writer flashed in every line." She also saw a book that was not ready, describing it as "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel." Over the next two and a half years, Hohoff steered Lee through draft after draft.

  The title changed along the way. Watchman was rejected, and the book became Atticus. Lee then settled on To Kill a Mockingbird, because the story reached beyond a portrait of one man. The novel went on sale on the 11th of July 1960.

  Lee later admitted she had expected nothing like what followed. She said she hoped for "a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers" while secretly wanting some public encouragement. What she got was far more, and she called it nearly as frightening as the death she had braced for. Reader's Digest Condensed Books chose the story for a shortened reprint, which put it in front of a very wide audience almost immediately.

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• 3. The Real Maycomb

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  Amasa Coleman Lee, Harper's father, practiced law and also edited and published the Monroeville newspaper. In 1919 he defended two black men accused of murder. Both were convicted, hanged and mutilated, and he never took another criminal case. He supported segregation more firmly than Atticus does, though he grew more liberal in his last years. Lee said the novel was no autobiography, only an author writing truthfully about what she knew. Her mother, Frances Cunningham Finch, died when Lee was 25. She had been prone to a nervous condition that left her mentally and emotionally absent.

  Next door to the Lees, in the summers, lived a boy then known as Truman Persons. He stayed with his aunts while his mother visited New York City. Lee used him as the model for Dill. He had a vivid imagination, a lisp, and a vocabulary that got him ridiculed. She was a scrappy tomboy quick to fight. The two wrote stories on an old Underwood typewriter given to them by her father. Capote called them "apart people." In 1960 they traveled together to Kansas to investigate the murders behind his book In Cold Blood.

  Down the street stood a house that was always boarded up. The family inside became the Radleys. Their son had gotten into legal trouble, and his father kept him home for 24 years out of shame. He was hidden until nearly forgotten, and he died in 1952.

  Tom Robinson has a murkier origin. When Lee was ten, a white woman near Monroeville accused a black man named Walter Lett of rape. Her father's newspaper covered the trial and reported that Lett was convicted and sentenced to death. Letters then appeared claiming he had been falsely accused, and the sentence was commuted to life. He died in prison of tuberculosis in 1937.

  Scholars also point to the Scottsboro Boys, nine black men convicted of raping two white women on negligible evidence. Lee said in 2005 that she had something less sensational in mind, though Scottsboro served "the same purpose" in exposing Southern prejudice. Some also see Emmett Till, murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman, behind Tom's fate.

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• 4. A Child's Voice

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  A six-year-old girl named Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, tells the story, and the reviewers argued about her from the start. The setting is the fictional Maycomb, Alabama, over three years of the Great Depression, 1933-35. Scout lives with her older brother Jeremy, nicknamed Jem, and their widowed father Atticus, a middle-aged lawyer. Calpurnia, a black cook, has long helped raise the children. Each summer, Dill arrives to stay with his aunt.

  Lee blends two voices. One is a child watching the street. The other is a grown woman looking back, and the flashback lets Lee play with perspective. An early Time review praised her "tactile brilliance." A later scholar said scenes melt into one another with cinematographic ease. Skeptics, including the critics Harding LeMay and Granville Hicks, doubted that children so sheltered could grasp the horrors of Tom Robinson's trial. The Atlantic Monthly found the voice implausible, a girl of six with the prose style of a well-educated adult.

  Humor carries the weight. Scholar Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin argues that laughter exposes rot beneath a pleasant surface while also shrinking it. When Dill promises to marry Scout and then ignores her for Jem, she beats him up until he notices. On her first school day, her teacher announces that Atticus has damaged her by teaching her to read, and forbids any more lessons.

  Scholars label the book both Southern Gothic and Bildungsroman, a story of growing up. The Gothic comes from Boo Radley and his shuttered house, and Lee herself used that word for the Maycomb courthouse. Others object, since Boo turns out to be human, protective and kind. Scholars compare Scout and Jem to the outsiders of The Catcher in the Rye and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The morning after the verdict, Jem tells Miss Maudie he feels like a caterpillar wrapped in a cocoon. One scholar reads the whole book as a feminist coming-of-age tale for Scout.

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• 5. The Mockingbird

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  On Christmas, Atticus gives his children air rifles and lets their Uncle Jack teach them to shoot. His rule is that they may shoot all the bluejays they want, but it is "a sin to kill a mockingbird." Puzzled, Scout asks Miss Maudie, who explains that mockingbirds harm nothing. "They don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us," she says. The family name Finch is itself a songbird, and it was also the maiden name of Lee's mother. Writing in 1964, Edwin Bruell summed up the symbol: killing a mockingbird means killing the innocent and harmless, like Tom Robinson.

  Tom stands accused of raping a young white woman, Mayella Ewell, and Judge Taylor appoints Atticus to defend him. One night Atticus faces men set on lynching Tom. The children turn up unexpectedly, and Scout talks heart-to-heart with a classmate's father, which breaks up the crowd. At the trial, the Reverend Sykes lets the children watch from the colored balcony. Atticus shows that Mayella and her father Bob are lying, yet the jury convicts. Within 24 hours of the verdict, Tom is shot dead, reportedly while trying to escape prison.

  Scholar Christopher Metress sees a second mockingbird in Boo. Scout starts the book staging gothic plays about his history for fun. She ends it seeing someone with an inner goodness worth cherishing. After a school pageant, Bob Ewell attacks Jem in the dark, breaking his arm. Someone carries Jem home, and Scout realizes the rescuer is Boo. Sheriff Tate finds Ewell dead from a knife wound and decides to report that Ewell fell on his own knife, to shield Boo.

  Reviewer R. A. Dave argues that nearly every character faces defeat, giving the book some of the shape of classical tragedy. Near the end, Scout tells Atticus about a misunderstood character in a story, who turned out to be "real nice." His answer closes the thought: "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."

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• 6. Atticus Finch at the Bar

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  When Atticus loses Tom's case, he is the last person to leave the courtroom, apart from his children and the black spectators in the balcony. They rise in silence as he walks beneath them. That scene helps explain why real lawyers took him so seriously. Scholar Alice Petry says Atticus has become a folk hero in legal circles, treated almost as if he were a real person.

  Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center credits Atticus for his decision to become a lawyer. Richard Matsch, the federal judge who presided over the Timothy McVeigh trial, names Atticus as a major influence on his judging. A law professor at the University of Notre Dame called the novel the most influential textbook he ever taught from. An article in the Michigan Law Review argued that no real-life lawyer had done more for the profession's self-image. It then asked whether Atticus is a paragon of honor or an especially slick hired gun.

  That doubt had a loud public moment in 1992. An Alabama editorial called for the death of Atticus, arguing that for all his liberalism he worked inside a system of institutionalized racism and sexism. Attorneys who had entered the profession because of him answered in a flurry of responses. Critics still call him morally ambiguous for not using his skills to challenge Maycomb's racist order.

  The state's legal establishment sided with the hero. In 1997, the Alabama State Bar put up a monument to Atticus in Monroeville, calling it the first commemorative milestone in the state's judicial history. In 2008 it gave Lee herself an honorary special membership, praising the character she created as the personification of the exemplary lawyer serving the poor.

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• 7. Praise and Protest

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  The reviews in 1960 pointed in every direction. The New Yorker called Lee "a skilled, unpretentious, and totally ingenuous writer." Time said Scout was the most appealing child since Carson McCullers' Frankie. The Chicago Sunday Tribune insisted the book was no sociological novel and underlined no cause. Hicks called it "melodramatic and contrived." Flannery O'Connor remarked that it was a child's book, and that the folks buying it did not know. Carson McCullers wrote to a cousin that Lee had been poaching on her literary preserves.

  Critics have kept arguing. Sports writer Allen Barra, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called its liberal humanism sadly dated and its picture of Alabama a sugar-coated myth. Thomas Mallon of The New Yorker thought that by the end of the trial the book had begun to cherish its own goodness. Editor Don Noble estimates that the ratio of sales to analytical essays may be a million to one.

  Meanwhile the novel was studied in classrooms as early as 1963, and the complaints began. In 1966, a parent in Hanover, Virginia, called its use of rape immoral. Hearing that school officials planned hearings, Lee mailed $10 to The Richmond News Leader. She suggested it go toward enrolling the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice. By 1968, the National Education Association ranked it second for complaints from private organizations, behind Little Black Sambo. The American Library Association placed it 21st among the 100 most frequently challenged books of 2000-2009. Virginia removed it from classrooms in 2016, and Biloxi, Mississippi, followed in 2017.

  From the 1970s, objections shifted. Critics said Maycomb's racism was not condemned harshly enough. They also said black characters such as Calpurnia are left unexamined, and that the story offers a white savior. School districts in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia tried to remove it in the 1990s. A Canadian language arts consultant found that white students connected with it while black students found it demoralizing.

  Many still tie the book to the civil rights movement, although Lee took no direct part in it. Andrew Young says it inspires hope amid chaos. Historian Diane McWhorter calls its existence, from a white Southerner in the late 1950s, an act of protest. Author James McBride is more guarded. He calls Lee brilliant but declines to call her brave, and says: "We need a thousand Atticus Finches."

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• 8. Afterlives

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  In 1961, in its 41st week on the bestseller list, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize, which stunned Lee. In 1995 she refused to write an introduction for the book, arguing that introductions kill the joy of anticipation. When tourists flooded Monroeville hoping for a glimpse of her, locals dubbed them Mockingbird groupies, and she met reporters with an emphatic "Hell, no!" In 2001 Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley made it the first title of the One City, One Book program, and Lee said there was no greater honor. By 2004-25 communities had chosen it for similar programs. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on the 5th of November 2007. In 2021, the New York Times named it the best book of the past 125 years, on the 28th of December.

  The film arrived in 1962, with Gregory Peck as Atticus, Robert Mulligan directing and Horton Foote writing the screenplay. It grossed more than $20 million from a budget of $2 million and won three Oscars, including Best Actor for Peck. Mary Badham, who played Scout, became the youngest actress nominated in her category. Lee gave Peck her father's pocket watch. When it was later stolen from his luggage at London Heathrow, she shrugged: "Well, it's only a watch."

  The stage has its own tradition. Since 1990, Monroeville has staged Christopher Sergel's adaptation each May on the courthouse grounds, with townspeople as the cast. White male audience members are picked at intermission to serve as the jury. In 2018, a new version by Aaron Sorkin opened on Broadway and was nominated for nine Tony Awards, winning one.

  Then came the 14th of July 2015, when the earlier draft, Go Set a Watchman, finally reached bookstores. Finished in 1957, it is set 20 years after Mockingbird and follows an adult Scout visiting Atticus from New York. Lee's lawyer Tonja Carter said she found the manuscript, though that account is widely disputed. Rare-books expert James S. Jaffe judged it only another draft, and forensic linguistics confirmed Lee as sole author. Lee died in February 2016.

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