Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is another of the “no-brainers” that appear on this list. It was immediately popular upon its first publication in 1960, and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. It has remained popular for more than sixty years, and is one of the most widely taught novels in high schools and in middle schools across the U.S. Lee’s novel appears on Time magazine’s list of “Greatest Books since 1923,” the Guardian list of best novels in English, the Observerlist of best world novels, and on the Penguin classics list of favorite novels as voted by their readers. Although the novel has had its detractors in recent years, its popularity seems to be greater than ever: In 2006, in a “World Book Day” poll conducted by Britain’s Museum, Libraries and Archives Council, the librarians of the U.K. answered the question “Which book should every adult read before they die?” by voting To Kill a Mockingbird as number one (followed by the Bible). In The Great American Read, a survey conducted by PBS in 2018, members of the American public voted To Kill a Mockingbird as “America’s Favorite Book.” And even more recently, in 2021, to mark the 125th anniversary of the publication of the New York Times Book Review, the Times invited readers to vote for the best book published during the past century and a quarter. After more than 200,000 voters from all 50 states and 67 other countries, the number one book of the past 125 years was To Kill a Mockingbird (followed closely by Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring and George Orwell’s 1984). Not surprisingly, Lee’s novel comes in as number 55 (alphabetically) on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Books in the English Language.”
It’s pretty well known that the novel is a fictionalized version of events that occurred in Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama in about 1936, when Lee was ten years old or so. Thus the narrator, Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, is a fictionalized version of Harper Lee herself. The novel’s “hero,” the courageous lawyer Atticus Finch, is modeled to a large extent upon Lee’s own father, himself a lawyer, and Scout’s friend Dill, a regular summer visitor from Mississippi, is based on Lee’s own childhood friend Truman Capote, with whom she spent a good portion of the year 1960—the year Mockingbird was published—helping to research his own blockbuster “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood.
In the novel, the Finch family live in the fictional Alabama town of Maycomb, seat of Maycomb County. Scout is six at the beginning of the novel, the action of which spans the years 1933-1935. Scout lives with her widowed father Atticus, her older brother Jeremy (“Jem”), and a black cook and housekeeper named Calpurnia, who has lived in the Finch household so long she has helped raise the children. The pint-sized boy Dill (“I’m little, but I’m old”) stays with his aunt, a neighbor of the Finches, every summer, and becomes a close friend of Jem and Scout. Another close neighbor is the Radley house, where lives the reclusive Arthur “Boo” Radley, who to Jem and Scout is only a name, since they have never seen him. The story goes that Arthur, having gotten in trouble with the law at some time in his youth, was thereafter confined to his own house by his parents, and had not been seen by anyone for many years. For the three neighborhood children, Boo Radley becomes a sort of local legend and mystery, and they imagine him as a kind of bogeyman, daring each other to touch his house and such things. After some time, they begin the find small gifts left in the hollow of a tree outside the Radley place, and they assume Boo Radley is leaving these for them, and Boo passes from Bogey man to Person of Interest, but the children still have yet to see him in person.
The nostalgic childhood scenes of small town America are disrupted by a life-changing development: Atticus is appointed by the court to defend Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a young white woman named Mayella Ewell. Such a defense is the Constitutional right of every American citizen, of course, and Atticus cannot be blamed by his neighbors for having been appointed. He does, however, incur the wrath of the white citizens of Maycomb by taking his responsibility seriously and determining to give Tom a vigorous defense, rather than do what is expected in the American south of the 1930s—to essentially do nothing and let the black man be convicted whether guilty or not. Jem and Scout are bullied by other children who, echoing their parents’ opinions, call Atticus every vile name in the book. But Atticus tells them not to get into fights with these people. These ugly racist feelings culminate one night as a mob congregates in front of the jail intending to lynch Tom. Atticus sits in front of the jailhouse and faces the mob alone, but when Scout shows up with Jem and Dill, and Scout greets the father of one of her classmates among the mob, the group breaks up in embarrassment.
The trial scene of the novel is for good reason the best-known and most admired section of the book. In a packed courtroom where Jem, Dill and Scout sneak in but can find seats only among the black spectators in the balcony, they watch Atticus completely demolish the prosecution’s case, noting that no doctor was ever consulted to determine whether Mayella had actually been raped, that Tom Robinson could not possibly have done what he was accused of because his left arm was maimed and unusable, and that the victim’s father, the shiftless “white trash” Bob Ewell, was almost certainly the one who had beaten her, though she is too afraid to admit it. Yet despite all of this, the all-white jury finds Tom Robinson guilty. Jem in particular is devastated by the injustice of this verdict, but Atticus is unsurprised. And although Atticus assures Tom that they have a very good chance of overturning the verdict on appeal, the aftermath of the trial leads to a number of complications that I won’t go into here for fear of creating spoilers for the handful of readers who might not actually have read To Kill a Mockingbird already.
There is no shortage of actual cases that may have given Lee the model for the Tom Robinson case. A similar event occurred in Monroeville when she was ten, though many reviewers have noted that the case of Emmet Till, a black teenager in Mississippi who was tortured and hanged in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman, would have been fresh in Lee’s mind. Till’s murderers were found not guilty by an all-white jury despite copious evidence to the contrary. In Mockingbird, of course, Tom Robinson is not lynched—though only because Atticus stands up to the mob. But he is very clearly falsely convicted despite the evidence. All such miscarriages of justice demonstrate a Southern mindset still firmly in place in the 1960s (and not yet obliterated) that makes a black man presumed guilty of any crime alleged against him by a white man—or, particularly, by a white woman—even if proven innocent.
Lee does not simply attack the justice system as practiced in the deep south in the 1950s as well as the 1930s. She opposes the offhand racism of white southerners in their everyday activities and conversations. Characters use “the N word” casually without thought—48 times throughout the novel—and although Atticus instructs his children not to use the word because of its coarseness, he is clearly the minority even among the more progressive citizens of Maycomb.
There is some humor in the relatively gentle irony with which Lee paints even these “good” people. Scout’s Aunt Alexandra shows righteous indignation when the children go to church with Calpurnia. And she belongs to a missionary society along with other hypocritical women who worry a great deal about the poor Mruna tribe in Africa and the benighted way they live, but have nothing but contempt for the poor blacks living in their own community. One of the women remarks “We can educate ’em till we’re blue in the face, we can try till we drop to make Christians out of ’em, but there’s no lady safe in her bed these nights.”
A similar irony is found in Scout’s classroom, where her teacher, Miss Gates, discusses with her class the status of Jews in Hitler’s 1936 Germany. One of the students remarks that persecution of Jews is irrational because Jews are white. Miss Gates only responds that the persecution of the Jews is “one of the most terrible stories in history.” It does not even occur to her that the unspoken implication in the student’s remark is that persecuting non-whites is perfectly understandable.
Even Atticus can be ironically blind on occasion. He discusses the problem of the composition of the jury in Tom Robinson’s case, noting that the more affluent and better educated citizens are often excused from jury duty, and that the laws of Alabama do not allow women to serve as jurors, but never mentions the glaring truth that the jury in Tom’s trial is all white. How exactly is that the jury of his peers guaranteed by the Constitution?
Racism is not the only theme in To Kill a Mockingbird, but it’s the most pervasive. The book is also a condemnation of both the schools and the courts—two institutions that should define and promote justice, but often fail to do so. It’s a feminist text as well, in which tomboy Scout fights against the views of femininity promoted by Aunt Alexandra and her ilk. And of course it’s a story of heroism that suggests even one person can make a difference in a difficult situation. Atticus’s definition of courage in the book explains his dogged defense of Tom Robinson in a losing cause: “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
And of course, the title is a suggestion of the book’s all-encompassing theme: Atticus gives Jem an air rifle, but tells him never to shoot at a mockingbird, because it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. Their neighbor Miss Maudie explains: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” The mockingbirds in the novel are those that do no one harm, yet may be abused. Tom Robinson is a mockingbird. Boo Radley is another.
Lee’s novel has come under fire in recent years for its overuse of “the N word.” Also for its one-dimensional characterization of its black characters, and its depiction of Atticus as a “white savior” type. Certainly from the point of view of current attitudes these objections are legitimate. But the novel wasn’t written yesterday. Nor does it suggest that the attitudes of the Macomb citizens are acceptable. It was written sixty-five years ago, about something that happened twenty-three years earlier than that. As a historical record, it preserves the situation of that particular era, and thereby served as a significant contribution to the civil rights movement. If it depicted a world conforming to the woke notions of 2024, it would be hard to explain why there was a civil rights movement at all.
There has been, of course, a classic 1962 film of the novel, directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. The film was nominated for eight Oscars, and won three, including one for Best Actor for Peck. Lee loved the film, especially approving Peck, and made a gift to him of her father’s watch. Anyone who has seen the movie can never read the book again without seeing Peck as Atticus in their mind’s eye. But do read the book. There is a lot more there than the movie can depict.