To Kill a Mockingbird

Description: "Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores ... the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice--but the weight of history will only tolerate so much"--Provided by publisher.

Brief description:

Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. One of America's most celebrated and influential writers, she is the author of the acclaimed novels To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman as well as the story and essay collection, The Land of Sweet Forever, published posthumously in 2025. Lee was awarded numerous literary awards and honors including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She died in 2016 at the age of eight-nine.

Review Quotes:

"A first novel of such rare excellence that it will no doubt make a great many readers slow down to relish more fully its simple distinction. . . . A novel of strong contemporary national significance." - Chicago Tribune

"All of the tactile brilliance and none of the precocity generally supposed to be standard swamp-warfare issues for Southern writers. . . . Novelist Lee's prose has an edge that cuts through cant, and she teaches the reader an astonishing number of useful truths about little girls and about Southern life." - Time

"That rare literary phenomenon, a Southern novel with no mildew on its magnolia leaves. Funny, happy and written with unspectacular precision, To Kill a Mockingbird is about conscience--how it is instilled in two children, Scout and Jem Finch; how it operates in their father, Atticus, a lawyer appointed to defend a Negro on a rape charge, and how conscience grows in their small Alabama town." - Vogue