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Harper Lee (1926 to 2016) grew up in Alabama in a town very much like the town she portrays in To Kill a Mockingbird. She did not expect her book to do very well and was surprised when it became a bestseller. It has never been out of print since its publication in 1960. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1961. In 1962, a successful black and white movie was made of the book, starting Gregory Peck. Lee’s book is a wonderful read, full of humor and family warmth between Atticus Finch and his two children, Jem and 10-year old Jean, nicknamed Scout. The story is told in first person by Scout, which adds an additional layer of charm, as we see adults and serious adult happenings through a child’s eyes.
The focus of the book is on the trial of Tom Robinson, an African-American man accused (falsely, as it turns out) of the rape of a white girl. Atticus Finch bravely takes on Tom’s defense, against significant opposition. There is much emphasis on the influence of church in the society of that small Alabama town, especially the black church to which Calpurnia, the Finch’s housekeeper and surrogate mother to Jem and Scout, belongs. Harper Lee was once quoted about her book: “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.” The power of the novel is the confrontation of this ethic with race relations and the lies of race prejudice. This is a high school level book, both in reading level and in subject matter. I would recommend that all students read this book before graduation, or a few years past high school graduation. In my public-school days, we all had to read The Catcher in the Rye – it would have been a much better use of our wasted time if instead we had had to read To Kill a Mockingbird.