To Kill a Mockingbird:An Introduction

One of the most influential novels in American history.

• Rated, after the Bible, as one book “most often cited as making a difference” in people’s lives

• Considered the one book “every adult should read before they die” by British librarians

• Voted the “Best Novel of the 20th century” by readers of the Library Journal

• Ranked fifth on the Modern Library’s Reader’s List of the 100 Best Novels in the English language since 1900

So what’s so special about To Kill a Mockingbird?

“Literature helps us to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.” ~ C.S. Lewis

“The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.”

~James McCosh

Reading---and thinking---requires careful attention to

detail

Pay careful attention to the butterfly in the following picture:

• What is it flying to?

• What color is it?

Pay careful attention to the woman in the following

picture:

• Is her eye open or closed?

• What color is her lipstick?

You can learn to

. . . see things

differently.

The Author

• Nelle Harper Lee, 34 year-old woman

• Born (1926) and raised in Monroeville, AL

• Daughter of Amasa Lee, a small-town lawyer and widower

• Law school drop out, 1949

• Childhood friend of author Truman Capote

The Setting

• Maycomb, Alabama, • 1930s • Great Depression

small-town Alabama, 1930s

CourthouseMonroeville, Alabama

An Alabama Sharecropper’s Home, 1936

African American church in Alabama

in the 1930s

Novel based on Famous Court Case:

The Scottsboro Boys1931-1937

Nine African American

teenagers falsely accused of rape.

The investigations

and trials lasted 6 years.

A white lawyer, Sam Leibowitz, defended the accused boys.

They were found guilty,

all were hung, although no

evidence could convict them.

Book:- published in 1960

- When she is writing it, it was the 1950s. What was

going on?

Southern states

opposed school

integration

May 1954: Supreme Court Orders School Integration

August 1955:A 14 year-old Chicago boy, Emmett Till,is murdered

in Mississippi.

Till’s killers are tried for murder

and are declared “not guilty” by an all-white

jury.

The Characters

• Narrator: Scout Finch, six-year-old girl• Atticus Finch, Scout’s father, widower, &

small-town lawyer• Jem Finch, Scout’s older brother• Dill Harris, strange, pint-sized summer

neighbor• ‘Boo’ Radley, mysterious & reclusive neighbor • Tom Robinson, African American man accused

of rape• Bob Ewell, poor red-neck racist

Atticus teaches Scout an important lesson

The Story

Set in small-town Alabama in the 1930s Spans three years Narrated by Scout 3 children learn about life by witnessing

the complicated problems facing adults in their small Alabama town.

Boo Radley’s house

What will To Kill a Mockingbird make you think

about?

What can you learn from reading it?

“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

~Atticus Finch, TKAM, p. 34

Whose skin will Scout get to climb into?

What kind of people do we need to understand?

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s garden’s, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hears out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

~Miss Maudie, TKAM, page 94

Who will turn out to be the “mockingbirds” in this

story?

Who was excluded from mainstream American life in the 1930s?

The 1950s?

The 2000s?

Who will Scout---and you---learn . .

.

to see differently?

To learn more about Harper Lee