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Book Reviewed by:Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred.
One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
1.
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem's fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn't have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.
When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.
I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn't run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where ...
Which books did you read in high school English class?
my side of the mountain by jean craighead george hatchet by gary paulsen of mice and men by john steinbeck how to kill a mockingbird by harper lee outsiders by se hinton
-brittnee_t
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (11/6/2025)
I am reading 'The Midnight Library' by Matt Haig for my new neighborhood book club (formed from our Buy Nothing group.) So far, I'm really liking it. Last week I read 'The Land of the Sweet Forever' by Harper Lee. This is a collection of short pieces she wrote before 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' TKAM...
-Evonne_Benedict
What's your favorite banned book?
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) & A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
-Carol_Ann_Robb
If you could meet one author in person, living or dead, who would it be and why did you choose them?
Oh, no question about it–Harper Lee. Being from Kansas, I'd love to hear her stories about being in Holcomb with Capote gathering material for "In Cold Blood" ( & address the rumors she wrote part of the book), not to mention any & everything about "To Kill a Mockingbird" (and meeting Gregory Pec...
-Carol_Ann_Robb
Rereading it years later, I found I still remembered the story's most vivid moments: Boo Radley and the tree where he leaves gifts for the siblings; Aunt Alexandra and her determination to make a lady out of Scout; Tom Robinson's crippled arm; Atticus's trial speech; the attack on a little girl dressed as a ham. All those elements, perhaps reinforced by the 1962 film adaptation, remain indelible. But what truly sustains the novel is the heart, humor, and intelligence with which Harper Lee weaves it all together with apparent ease. Reading To Kill a Mockingbird at 13, over Christmas, sprawled on a chaise longue, was comforting. I was about the same age as the children in the novel and understood them on their level. The same thing when, in my mid-20s, I read Go Set a Watchman—in this book, Scout, now 26, faces another kind of disillusionment: the one we feel when our parents appear before us no longer as idols but flawed humans. Yet To Kill a Mockingbird remains the superior work—more solid, more coherent, more precise. In portraying failure, it achieves success: a deeply human portrait, a story that can still teach us to read, and see, with fresh eyes...continued
Full Review
(970 words)
(Reviewed by Alicia Calvo Hernández).
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, tells the story of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, a six-year-old girl growing up with her brother, Jem, and their widowed father, Atticus Finch, an upstanding lawyer who takes on the defense of a young Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Go Set a Watchman (2015) ostensibly resumes the story twenty years later, when Jean Louise returns home from New York for a visit and discovers that her father, whom she has idolized all her life, is in fact a racist man.
When HarperCollins announced Go Set a Watchman's impending publication in 2015, controversy followed. At the age of 89, after a lifetime of saying she would never again publish a novel, and while ...
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