To Kill a Mockingbird: racism, gun violence and coming of age in the 1930s South

Secret Life of Books

Within a year of its publication in 1960, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird sold 2.5 million copies and has remained a much-loved classic by adults and children alike. What was it about this book that captured the public imagination at the time - and to this day?

Harper Lee mined her own childhood in Alabama for this coming-of-age story of personal and social justice against a backdrop of Depression-era America. She worked and reworked several earlier drafts before achieving the crystal precision of what would prove her masterpiece. Harper imagined the book would be just the first in an illustrious career; that she would fulfil her dream of becoming, in her own words, ‘the Jane Austen of South Alabama’. But she never wrote another novel.

Sophie and Jonty argue that the success of To Kill A Mockingbird rested on the way it optimistically presented a path of reconciliation through what was, at the time, a subject of deep national division - segregation and civil rights. Harper’s Mockingbird, like Martin Luther King’s famous dream, contained a message of hope. But was it a realistic one?

At the very end of her life, and in controversial circumstances, an earlier draft of what became To Kill A Mockingbird was published. Titled Go Set A Watchman, this book presented a more pessimistic view of American society. It’s less convincing as a work of art, but - in many ways - a more truthful one.

Content warning: discusses gun violence, racism, domestic and sexual violence.
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Further Reading:

Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird, (Harper, 2010)

Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman, (Harper, 2015)

Charles J Shields, I Am Scout (Square Fish, 2008)

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South, ed. Sharon Monteith, (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Neal Dolan, “The Class Dynamics of Antiracism in Go Set a Watchman.” (Twentieth Century Literature, [s. l.], v. 69, n. 2, p. 121–146, 2023)

W.D. Kim, "Animal Imagery in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird," (ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, [s. l.], v. 35, n. 2, p. 161–166, 2022)

J. C. Ford, “Birds of a Feather: Gay Uncle Jack and Queer Cousin Francis in To Kill a Mockingbird,” (ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, [s. l.], v. 36, n. 3, p. 418–433, 2023).