To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
1960
Around 340 pages
This book was required reading at my nearly all white high school, to prove that we could all talk about racism, as long as it was coming from a white lady. I know this is many people's favorite novel, but I've always found it overrated.
Even if you haven't read this book, you've probably gathered what the plot is based on all the cultural references. The story takes place in Alabama during the Great Depression. Six-year-old Scout lives with her brother Jem and her widowed father Atticus, who is a daddy in more than one sense of the word. Tom Robinson, a black man, is accused of raping a white woman, and Atticus is appointed as his attorney. Naturally, this makes the white people mad.
Lee does an excellent job capturing a complex story through the eyes of a child. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of stories from the point of view of children, but she deftly handles the perspective of a kid, even if Scout is more astute than any real six year old would be.
I don't know if this should be treated as the definitive treatise on racism in America, but it's a well intentioned story with a somewhat predictable ending.
RATING: ****-
Interesting Facts:
The New York Times announced To Kill a Mockingbird as the best book of the past 125 years in 2021.
When Lee was 10 years old, a white woman near Monroeville accused a black man named Walter Lett of raping her. The story and the trial were covered by her father's newspaper, which reported that Lett was convicted and sentenced to death. After a series of letters appeared claiming Lett had been falsely accused, his sentence was commuted to life in prison. He died there of tuberculosis in 1937.
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