To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American writer Harper Lee, published in 1960. It is set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s, and it is narrated by a young girl, Scout Finch, looking back on her childhood.

Scout is six when the novel begins, growing up with her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus, a lawyer, in a town where every neighbour is known to her. When Atticus agrees to defend a Black man accused of attacking a white woman, much of the town turns against the family.

Scout watches the trial from the gallery and reports what she sees, understanding only part of what is said around her, which is how the book shows the gap between the world the children live in and the one the adults have made. The trial runs alongside the children's own curiosity about their reclusive neighbour, Boo Radley.

Lee drew on her own childhood in Monroeville, Alabama, and on an event there in 1936 when she was ten, and the novel won the Pulitzer Prize the year after it appeared. It was adapted into a film in 1962 and is a standalone novel.