To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
American writer Harper Lee is famous for her race relations novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. The book became an international bestseller and was adapted to film in 1962. Lee was 34 when the work was published. In 2015 it was revealed that To Kill a Mockingbird was actually the second one she had ever written. Her first attempt, Go Set a Watchmen, remained unpublished until 2015.
The book is set in Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s. Atticus Finch, a lawyer and a father, defends a black man, Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a poor white girl, Mayella Ewell. The setting and several of the characters are drawn from life - Finch was the maiden name of Lee's mother and the character of Dill was drawn from Truman Capote, Lee's childhood friend. The trial itself has parallels to the infamous "Scottsboro Trial," in which the charge was rape. In both, the defendants were African-American men and the accusers white women.
The book is set in Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s. Atticus Finch, a lawyer and a father, defends a black man, Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a poor white girl, Mayella Ewell. The setting and several of the characters are drawn from life - Finch was the maiden name of Lee's mother and the character of Dill was drawn from Truman Capote, Lee's childhood friend. The trial itself has parallels to the infamous "Scottsboro Trial," in which the charge was rape. In both, the defendants were African-American men and the accusers white women.
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