A Comprehensive Analysis of To Kill a Mockingbird- Harper Lee. This text is approved for WASSCE, JAMB, NECO, and GCE from 2026-2030. Full text summary for both Literature students and teachers.
Background of Harper Lee
Harper Lee, known as Nelle, was born in the Alabama town of Monroeville, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who served on the state legislature from 1926 to 1938. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote.
After graduating from high school in Monroeville, Lee enrolled at the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery (1944-45), and then pursued a law degree at the University of Alabama (1945-50), pledging the Chi Omega sorority. While there, she wrote for several student publications and spent a year as editor of the campus humor magazine, “Ramma-Jamma”. Though she did not complete the law degree, she studied for a summer in Oxford, England, before moving to New York in 1950, where she worked as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC.
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Lee continued as a reservation clerk until the late 50s, when she devoted herself to writing. She lived a frugal life, traveling between her cold-water-only apartment in New York to her family home in Alabama to care for her father.
Having written several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. The following month at the East 50th townhouse of her friends Michael Brown and Joy Williams Brown, she received a gift of a year’s wages with a note: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”
Within a year, she had a first draft. Working with J. B. Lippincott & Co. editor Tay Hohoff, she completed To Kill a Mockingbird in the summer of 1959. Published July 11, 1960, the novel was an immediate bestseller and won great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It remains a bestseller with more than 30 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted “Best Novel of the Century” in a poll by the Library Journal.
Summary of “To Kill a Mocking Bird”
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee. Although it was written in 1960 it is set in the mid-1930s in the small town of Maycomb, Alabama. It is narrated by Scout Finch, a six-year-old tomboy who lives with her lawyer father Atticus and her ten-year-old brother Jem. During the novel Scout, Jem and their friend Dill try to make their reclusive neighbour Boo Radley leave his house. Boo has not been seen in Maycomb since he was a teenager.
Many residents of Maycomb are racists and during the novel Atticus is asked to defend Tom Robinson, a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman. Atticus takes on the case even though everyone knows he has little hope of winning. The reader sees the trial develop through the childlike eyes of Scout, as gradually both she and her brother learn some valuable life lessons from their father about tolerance, empathy and understanding.
Key Plot Details
- Dill arrives in Maycomb and meets Scout and Jem.
- They plan to make the local recluse Boo Radley leave his house.
- Scout starts school and takes an immediate dislike to it.
- Scout and Jem begin to find gifts left in a hole in the Radley oak tree.
- Dill returns and the children continue their games based around Boo Radley. Jem gets his trousers caught on the Radley fence but when he returns for them, they have been clumsily sewn back together.
- The hole in the tree is filled with cement and the children cannot leave their letter of thanks. No more gifts can be left.
- It snows for the first time in many years and Miss Maudie’s house burns down.
- Atticus shocks the children by shooting the mad dog.
- Jem beheads Mrs. Dubose’s camellias when she teases him about Atticus defending Tom Robinson, a black man charged with raping Mayella Ewell who is white. As a punishment, Atticus sends Jem to read to Mrs. Dubose.
- Atticus sits outside Tom Robinson’s prison cell in order to save him from the lynch
- The trial begins but despite being innocent Tom is found guilty.
- Tom tries to escape and is shot dead.
- Bob Ewell, Mayella Ewell’s father attacks Jem and Scout but he is killed by Boo Radley who leaves his house in order to save them.
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Setting of Summary of “To Kill a Mocking Bird”
To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in Maycomb, Alabama during 1933–1935. These years place the events of the novel squarely within two important periods of American history: the Great Depression and the Jim Crow era. The Great Depression is reflected in the poverty that affects all of the residents of Maycomb. Even the Finches, who are objectively better off than many of the other citizens in the area, are ultimately poor and living within the means available to them. The years depicted in the novel also fall within the much longer period of time that modern historians often refer to as the Jim Crow era.
This term describes the time from the late 19th century until the mid-1960s when Black people in the United States could no longer be held in slavery, but where laws limited the social, political, and economic possibilities available to Black citizens. We should remember that when Harper Lee wrote the novel in the late 1950s, the Great Depression was over, but Jim Crow laws were still present in substantial portions of the American South.
The fictional town of Maycomb, in the fictional Maycomb County, seems intended not to represent an exact location in the real world, but a kind of small Southern town that existed in the 1930s. Scout describes the town as old, tired, and suffocating. In addition to being literally appropriate, these descriptions also apply to more subtle social aspects of the town.
The town is burdened, Atticus might say diseased, by social prejudices in general, and racism in particular. Maycomb is also sharply geographically divided along class lines. While more prosperous families like the Finches live in large houses close to the center of town, the Ewells live in a ramshackle cabin near the dump, out of sight of the rest of the town except at Christmas, when people drive their trees and trash to the dump. The only other dwellings in this area are the cabins where Black families live, an indication that the town is both racially and economically segregated. The Ewells lack basic necessities like running water and insulation, and they frequently forage in the dump for food. “Every town the size of the Maycomb had families like the Ewells,” Scout says, implying that the economic inequality is endemic to the region.
Class Activities
- Discuss the background of the author of “To Kill a Mocking Bird”;
- Identify the different level of setting of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mocking Bird”
Assignment
Write the summary of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mocking Bird”
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