NEA Big Read NEA Big Read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they’re quite different from people who must write. About the Book Introduction to the Book Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird begins at the end. The novel opens with the adult Jean Louise "Scout" Finch writing, "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." By the time Jem finally gets around to breaking his arm more than 250 pages later most readers will have forgotten they were ever warned. This echoes the way the whole book unfolds-in no special hurry, with lifelike indirection. Nothing happens all by itself. The book's two plots inch forward along parallel tracks, only converging near the end. The first plot revolves around Arthur "Boo" Radley, who lives in a shuttered house down the street from the Finches and is rumored to be some kind of monster. Scout, Jem, and their next-door neighbor Dill engage in pranks, trying to make Boo show himself.

Unexpectedly, Boo reciprocates their interest with a series of small gifts, until he ultimately steps off his porch and into their lives when they need him most. The second story concerns Scout and Jem's father, the attorney Atticus Finch. The local judge appoints him to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, who is falsely accused of raping a white woman. Atticus suspects he will lose the case, but he faces up to the challenge just the same, at one point heroically stepping between his client and a lynch mob. Along with its twin plot lines, To Kill a Mockingbird has two broad themes: tolerance and justice. Lee treats the first through the children's fear of their mysterious neighbor. She illustrates the second with Atticus's courage in defending Robinson to the best of his ability, despite the racial prejudices of their small Southern town. Tying the stories together is a simple but profound piece of advice Atticus gives Scout: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view....

Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." By the end of the novel, Scout has done exactly that—guessed at the pain not only beneath Tom Robinson's skin, but also under that of her neighbor. How the Novel Came to Be Written Any claims for To Kill a Mockingbird as a book that changed history could not have seemed more far-fetched one winter night in 1958, as Nelle Harper Lee huddled in her outer-borough New York apartment trying to finesse her unruly, episodic manuscript into some semblance of a cohesive novel. All but drowning in multiple drafts of the same material, Lee suddenly threw open a window and scattered five years of work onto the dirty snow below. Did Lee really intend to destroy To Kill a Mockingbird? We'll never know. Fortunately, in the next moment, she called her editor. J.B. Lippincott's formidable Tay Hohoff promptly sent her outside to gather all the pages back–thus rescuing To Kill a Mockingbird from the slush. The novel had its origins in Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama—the small, Southern town that the fictional Maycomb is based upon.

Her father's unsuccessful defense of a black man and his son accused of murder, in addition to the Scottsboro Boys trials and another notorious interracial rape case, helped to shape Lee's budding social conscience and sense of a dramatic story. Along with his legal practice, Lee's father published and edited the town newspaper. His regard for the written word impacted Lee's sensibility as surely as his respect for the law. Lee would name her idealized vision of her father after Titus Pomponius Atticus, a friend of the Roman orator Cicero renowned as, according to Lee, "a wise, learned and humane man." For a long time, Lee called her work in progress Atticus. Once she fastened on To Kill a Mockingbird she did not look back. An early version of the novel, titled Go Set a Watchman, featured Scout as an adult returning to Maycomb. Lee’s editor, Tay Hohoff, asked her to rewrite the story from a child’s perspective, which she did. Until recently, the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman was believed lost. It was discovered decades later and published by HarperCollins in July 2015.

Lippincott finally published To Kill a Mockingbird on July 11, 1960, by which time an unprecedented four national mail-order book clubs had already selected it for their readers. The first line of the Washington Post's review echoed many similar notices that praised the novel for its moral impact: "A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird." Eighty weeks later, the novel still perched on the hardcover bestseller list. During that time, it had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the hearts of American readers. One can't help wondering how literary history might have been different had Harper Lee thrown her manuscript out the window on a slightly windier night. "Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they're quite different from people who must write." —Harper Lee from a 1964 interview Get involved with NEA Big Read!

Harper Lee – To Kill A Mockingbird (Book Review) – Aidan J. Reid Aidan J. Reid Opening Line: When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. Book Cover Blurb: “Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” A lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee‘s classic novel – a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to 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 of one man’s struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

Genre: Literary Fiction Sample Passage: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” Review Although this book has been referred to as a ‘classic’, I’ll confess – I wasn’t looking forward to reading it. My bias stemmed from the blurb which depicted a storyline that I simply had no real interest in – the setting, period or the genre. I’m more a of a sci-fi/thriller, action packed kind of reader. Owning the DVD (which I hadn’t yet watched) based on the book, Gregory Peck adorned the cover, playing the lawyer Atticus Finch. The still shot was black and white, dull as dishwater and compounded my fear that it would be a long slog to get through – yet another court-room drama. A silly presupposition of course given that it was published fifty-six years earlier and would have been responsible for many of the copy-cats since. After a few chapters, the characters and world reeled me in. It was nothing like what I expected, a story told through the eyes of a nine-year old girl.

The court-room scenes, although a pivotal piece of the story and it’s theme, actually only takes up a couple of chapters in the book, and was by no means at a plodding pace. The book, at times, read like a Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn adventure where Scout, Jem and their friend Dill explore the little town, usually in their own heads as they concoct games centring around their reclusive neighbour, Boo Radley. Set against a backdrop of 1930’s America, steeped in prejudice, it is an insightful narrative of life in a small backwater community and the racial divide at that time. Spanning a couple of years where the characters each grow in the readers eyes, fighting their own private battles, lawyer and single father Atticus Finch stands out as the voice of reason, a pillar of the community who is tested on many occasions, not least, providing consul for a man who everyone has already marked as guilty – simply because of the colour of his skin. He’s a wonderfully written character and the struggle at the conclusion confirms his moral code and ethics despite his personal feelings. Strangely enough, I read this book while at the same time watching Making a Murderer.

Interesting to see the parallels and prejudices people harbour against others just because they occupy a place in the lower rungs of the social ladder. All in all, it took a little while to get going but I speed read through the second half of this book in a couple of days, keen to follow the characters to the end. Author: Harper Lee Other Books Written: Go Set A Watchman Time to Complete: 4 weeks Interesting Fact: Harper Lee apparently spent 6 to 12 hours each day at her desk writing the story , typically only creating one page of text. It was sent to 10 publishers who all initially rejected it. Rating: 8.5 /10 To Kill A Mockingbird: Novel Summary: Chapters 1-2 | Novelguide To Kill A Mockingbird: Novel Summary: Chapters 1-2 Total Votes: 21924 Chapter 1: To Kill a Mockingbird begins, "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.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" (9). Only after one finishes Mockingbird does the significance of Jem's broken arm become apparent. How did it happen? Harper Lee refers to the subject only one other time at the end of the book, turning her attention instead to describing the setting and introducing her main characters. Through six-year old Scout, her narrator, Lee draws an affectionate and detailed portrait of Maycomb, Alabama, a small, sleepy, depression-era town. She writes, "People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy, and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County" (11).

In chapter one we meet Atticus, Scout's father, who left his home, Finch's Landing, down the river from Maycomb, to study law in Mobile, Alabama. Atticus returned to Maycomb to practice law and help his brother, Jack, through medical school. About Atticus, Scout relates, "He liked Maycomb, he was Maycomb County born and bred; he knew his people, and they knew him, and because of [his father's] industry, Atticus was related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in the town" (11). We meet Calpurnia, the Finch's housekeeper who Scout describes as "all angles and bones.her hand was wide as a bed slat and twice as hard" (12). Scout, opinionated and vocal, faced Calpurnia's discipline often. She tells us, "our battles were epic and one-sided. Calpurnia always won, mainly because Atticus always took her side" (12). Finally, we meet six-year old Dill a neighbor boy visiting for the summer from Meridian, Mississippi. Jem and Scout spot Dill hiding in a collard patch and proceed to interrogate him.

Dill prides himself on his ability to read and impresses Jem by revealing that his mother entered him in a beautiful baby contest, won five dollars, and gave the winnings to Dill who used the money to visit the picture shows 20 times. Having passed Jem and Scout's tests, Dill quickly becomes the Finch children's best friend. The three playmates spend their time acting out scenes from their favorite books and dreaming about Boo Radley. "The Radley Place fascinated Dill. In spite of our warnings and explanations it drew him as the moon draws water, but drew him no nearer than the light-pole on the corner" (14). Thus begins the fascination with Boo Radley. According to Maycomb lore and the children's vivid imaginations, Boo is a "malevolent phantom" (15) often blamed for the unexplained bad things that happened in town from time to time. Boo ran with the wrong gang when he was a kid and got into trouble one night. Instead of sending him to an asylum or locking him up in the courthouse jail, Boo's father took him home on the promise that Boo would cause no more trouble.

Since then Boo remained shut in his house while rumors swirled about his mental state and his legend grew. Although Atticus urges the children to leave the Radley house, now occupied by Boo, his mother, and his brother, Nathan, Jem, Dill, and Scout succumb to their curiosity. The chapter ends with Dill daring Jem to run inside the Radley's fence and touch the house. Jem takes the dare. Chapter 2: The summer has ended with Dill returning to Meridian and Scout starting her first day of school. Miss Caroline, Scout's first grade teacher, scolds Scout because she already knows how to read. "Your father does not know how to teach" (24) Miss Caroline pronounces of Atticus. She forbids Scout from reading with Atticus and begins the year upset with, perhaps, her smartest student. Miss Caroline is new to Maycomb so she doesn't know any of the students, their families, or their family's eccentricities. Determined to help her learn Maycomb's ways and egged on by her fellow students, Scout offers Miss Caroline pointers on how to get along with folks such as Walter Cunningham.

Miss Caroline offers a quarter to Walter (whose father's name is also Walter Cunningham) who did not bring a lunch to school with him. When Walter refuses to take the quarter but Miss Caroline insists, Scout interjects, ".you'll get to know all the county folks after a while. The Cunninghams never took anything they can't pay back-no church baskets and not scrip stamps. Thy never took anything off of anybody, they get along on what they have. They don't have much, but they get along on it" (27). As she was with the fact that Scout already reads, Miss Caroline is not pleased with Scout's imprudent behavior. Scout describes her reaction: "Miss Caroline stood stock still, then grabbed me by the collar and hauled me back to her desk. 'Jean Louis, I've had about enough of you this morning,' she said. 'You're starting out on the wrong foot in every way, my dear" (28). She pats Scout's hands with a ruler and sends Scout to stand in the corner. The chapter ends with Scout and her class filing out to lunch at the sound of the noon bell.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - PDF Download Home » Books » Fiction Other » To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Author: Harper Lee Publish Date: October 11, 1988 ISBN-10: 0446310786 Language: English Book Description 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 would we be if he hadn’t? We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right. Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings. All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess. In England, Simon was irritated by the persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more liberal brethren, and as Simon called himself a Methodist, he worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens.

Mindful of John Wesley’s strictures on the use of many words in buying and selling, Simon made a pile practicing medicine, but in this pursuit he was unhappy lest he be tempted into doing what he knew was not for the glory of God, as the putting on of gold and costly apparel. So Simon, having forgotten his teacher’s dictum on the possession of human chattels, bought three slaves and with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River some forty miles above Saint Stephens. He returned to Saint Stephens only once, to find a wife, and with her established a line that ran high to daughters. Simon lived to an impressive age and died rich. It was customary for the men in the family to remain on Simon’s homestead, Finch’s Landing, and make their living from cotton. The place was self-sufficient: modest in comparison with the empires around it, the Landing nevertheless produced everything required to sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clothing, supplied by river-boats from Mobile.

Simon would have regarded with impotent fury the disturbance between the North and the South, as it left his descendants stripped of everything but their land, yet the tradition of living on the land remained unbroken until well into the twentieth century, when my father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery to read law, and his younger brother went to Boston to study medicine. Their sister Alexandra was the Finch who remained at the Landing: she married a taciturn man who spent most of his time lying in a hammock by the river wondering if his trot-lines were full. Download Ebook About To Kill a Mockingbird | Irving, TX - Official Website About To Kill a Mockingbird About To Kill a Mockingbird Starting in late September, readers can pick up a free copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and a ten page Readers's Guide from the NEA at the library or at special Big Read events. Electronic copies of both the novel and Reader's Guide are available. The Reader's Guide for Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird provides context for the novel, including a profile of Harper Lee, and a history of the Jim Crow, or pre-Civil Rights, American South. A list of discussion questions and complimentary works are provided.

Below is the Introduction from the Reader's Guide. Reader's Guide - Introduction Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird begins at the end. The novel opens with the adult Jean Louise "Scout" Finch writing, "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." By the time Jem finally gets around to breaking his arm more than 250 pages later most readers will have forgotten they were ever warned. This echoes the way the whole book unfolds-in no special hurry, with lifelike indirection. Nothing happens all by itself. The book's two plots inch forward along parallel tracks, only converging near the end. The first plot revolves around Arthur "Boo" Radley, who lives in a shuttered house down the street from the Finches and is rumored to be some kind of monster. Scout, Jem, and their next-door neighbor Dill engage in pranks, trying to make Boo show himself. Unexpectedly, Boo reciprocates their interest with a series of small gifts, until he ultimately steps off his porch and into their lives when they need him most. The second story concerns Scout and Jem's father, the attorney Atticus Finch.

The local judge appoints him to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, who is falsely accused of raping a white woman. Atticus suspects he will lose the case, but he faces up to the challenge just the same, at one point heroically stepping between his client and a lynch mob. Along with its twin plot lines, To Kill a Mockingbird has two broad themes: tolerance and justice. Lee treats the first through the children's fear of their mysterious neighbor. She illustrates the second with Atticus's courage in defending Robinson to the best of his ability, despite the racial prejudices of their small Southern town. Tying the stories together is a simple but profound piece of advice Atticus gives Scout: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." By the end of the novel, Scout has done exactly that-guessed at the pain not only beneath Tom Robinson's skin, but also under that of her neighbor. 2015 ONE BOOK, ONE IRVING SPONSORS 2015 SELECTED BOOK BookDaily.com - To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Are you an AUTHOR?

Click here to include your books on BookDaily.com Book Description 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, available now for the first time as a digital audiobook. One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the 20th 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. from audible.com Sample Chapter 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 would we be if he hadn't? We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right. Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings.

All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess. In England, Simon was irritated by the persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more liberal brethren, and as Simon called himself a Methodist, he worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens. Mindful of John Wesley's strictures on the use of many words in buying and selling, Simon made a pile practicing medicine, but in this pursuit he was unhappy lest he be tempted into doing what he knew was not for the glory of God, as the putting on of gold and costly apparel. So Simon, having forgotten his teacher's dictum on the possession of human chattels, bought three slaves and with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River some forty miles above Saint Stephens. He returned to Saint Stephens only once, to find a wife, and with her established a line that ran high to daughters. Simon lived to an impressive age and died rich. It was customary for the men in the family to remain on Simon's homestead, Finch's Landing, and make their living from cotton.

The place was self-sufficient: modest in comparison with the empires around it, the Landing nevertheless produced everything required to sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clothing, supplied by river-boats from Mobile. Simon would have regarded with impotent fury the disturbance between the North and the South, as it left his descendants stripped of everything but their land, yet the tradition of living on the land remained unbroken until well into the twentieth century, when my father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery to read law, and his younger brother went to Boston to study medicine. Their sister Alexandra was the Finch who remained at the Landing: she married a taciturn man who spent most of his time lying in a hammock by the river wondering if his trot-lines were full. When my father was admitted to the bar, he returned to Maycomb and began his practice. Maycomb, some twenty miles east of Finch's Landing, was the county seat of Maycomb County. Atticus's office in the courthouse contained little more than a hat rack, a spittoon, a checkerboard and an unsullied Code of Alabama. His first two clients were the last two persons hanged in the Maycomb County jail.

Atticus had urged them to accept the state's generosity in allowing them to plead Guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives, but they were Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass. The Haverfords had dispatched Maycomb's leading blacksmith in a misunderstanding arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a mare, were imprudent enough to do it in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that the-son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coming-to-him was a good enough defense for anybody. They persisted in pleading Not Guilty to first-degree murder, so there was nothing much Atticus could do for his clients except be present at their departure, an occasion that was probably the beginning of my father's profound distaste for the practice of criminal law. During his first five years in Maycomb, Atticus practiced economy more than anything; for several years thereafter he invested his earnings in his brother's education. John Hale Finch was ten years younger than my father, and chose to study medicine at a time when cotton was not worth growing; but after getting Uncle Jack started, Atticus derived a reasonable income from the law.

He liked Maycomb, he was Maycomb County born and bred; he knew his people, they knew him, and because of Simon Finch's industry, Atticus was related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in the town. Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum. People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer.

There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself. We lived on the main residential street in town--Atticus, Jem and I, plus Calpurnia our cook. Jem and I found our father satisfactory: he played with us, read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment. Calpurnia was something else again. She was all angles and bones; she was nearsighted; she squinted; her hand was wide as a bed slat and twice as hard. She was always ordering me out of the kitchen, asking me why I couldn't behave as well as Jem when she knew he was older, and calling me home when I wasn't ready to come. Our battles were epic and one-sided. Calpurnia always won, mainly because Atticus always took her side. She had been with us ever since Jem was born, and I had felt her tyrannical presence as long as I could remember.

Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence. She was a Graham from Montgomery; Atticus met her when he was first elected to the state legislature. He was middle-aged then, she was fifteen years his junior. Jem was the product of their first year of marriage; four years later I was born, and two years later our mother died from a sudden heart attack. They said it ran in her family. I did not miss her, but I think Jem did. He remembered her clearly, and sometimes in the middle of a game he would sigh at length, then go off and play by himself behind the car-house. When he was like that, I knew better than to bother him. When I was almost six and Jem was nearly ten, our summertime boundaries (within calling distance of Calpurnia) were Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose's house two doors to the north of us, and the Radley Place three doors to the south. We were never tempted to break them. The Radley Place was inhabited by an unknown entity the mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for days on end; Mrs. Dubose was plain hell. That was the summer Dill came to us.

Early one morning as we were beginning our day's play in the back yard, Jem and I heard something next door in Miss Rachel Haverford's collard patch. We went to the wire fence to see if there was a puppy--Miss Rachel's rat terrier was expecting--instead we found someone sitting looking at us. Sitting down, he wasn't much higher than the collards. We stared at him until he spoke: "Hey." To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee | Excerpt | Teenreads by Harper Lee PART ONE 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 would we be if he hadn't? We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right. Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings. All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess.

In England, Simon was irritated by the persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more liberal brethren, and as Simon called himself a Methodist, he worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens. Mindful of John Wesley's strictures on the use of many words in buying and selling, Simon made a pile practicing medicine, but in this pursuit he was unhappy lest he be tempted into doing what he knew was not for the glory of God, as the putting on of gold and costly apparel. So Simon, having forgotten his teacher's dictum on the possession of human chattels, bought three slaves and with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River some forty miles above Saint Stephens. He returned to Saint Stephens only once, to find a wife, and with her established a line that ran high to daughters. Simon lived to an impressive age and died rich. It was customary for the men in the family to remain on Simon's homestead, Finch's Landing, and make their living from cotton.

The place was self-sufficient: modest in comparison with the empires around it, the Landing nevertheless produced everything required to sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clothing, supplied by river-boats from Mobile. Simon would have regarded with impotent fury the disturbance between the North and the South, as it left his descendants stripped of everything but their land, yet the tradition of living on the land remained unbroken until well into the twentieth century, when my father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery to read law, and his younger brother went to Boston to study medicine. Their sister Alexandra was the Finch who remained at the Landing: she married a taciturn man who spent most of his time lying in a hammock by the river wondering if his trot-lines were full. When my father was admitted to the bar, he returned to Maycomb and began his practice. Maycomb, some twenty miles east of Finch's Landing, was the county seat of Maycomb County. Atticus's office in the courthouse contained little more than a hat rack, a spittoon, a checkerboard and an unsullied Code of Alabama. His first two clients were the last two persons hanged in the Maycomb County jail.

Atticus had urged them to accept the state's generosity in allowing them to plead Guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives, but they were Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass. The Haverfords had dispatched Maycomb's leading blacksmith in a misunderstanding arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a mare, were imprudent enough to do it in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that the-son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coming-to-him was a good enough defense for anybody. They persisted in pleading Not Guilty to first-degree murder, so there was nothing much Atticus could do for his clients except be present at their departure, an occasion that was probably the beginning of my father's profound distaste for the practice of criminal law. During his first five years in Maycomb, Atticus practiced economy more than anything; for several years thereafter he invested his earnings in his brother's education. John Hale Finch was ten years younger than my father, and chose to study medicine at a time when cotton was not worth growing; but after getting Uncle Jack started, Atticus derived a reasonable income from the law.

He liked Maycomb, he was Maycomb County born and bred; he knew his people, they knew him, and because of Simon Finch's industry, Atticus was related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in the town. Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum. People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer.

There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself. We lived on the main residential street in town--Atticus, Jem and I, plus Calpurnia our cook. Jem and I found our father satisfactory: he played with us, read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment. Calpurnia was something else again. She was all angles and bones; she was nearsighted; she squinted; her hand was wide as a bed slat and twice as hard. She was always ordering me out of the kitchen, asking me why I couldn't behave as well as Jem when she knew he was older, and calling me home when I wasn't ready to come. Our battles were epic and one-sided. Calpurnia always won, mainly because Atticus always took her side. She had been with us ever since Jem was born, and I had felt her tyrannical presence as long as I could remember.

Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence. She was a Graham from Montgomery; Atticus met her when he was first elected to the state legislature. He was middle-aged then, she was fifteen years his junior. Jem was the product of their first year of marriage; four years later I was born, and two years later our mother died from a sudden heart attack. They said it ran in her family. I did not miss her, but I think Jem did. He remembered her clearly, and sometimes in the middle of a game he would sigh at length, then go off and play by himself behind the car-house. When he was like that, I knew better than to bother him. When I was almost six and Jem was nearly ten, our summertime boundaries (within calling distance of Calpurnia) were Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose's house two doors to the north of us, and the Radley Place three doors to the south. We were never tempted to break them. The Radley Place was inhabited by an unknown entity the mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for days on end; Mrs. Dubose was plain hell. That was the summer Dill came to us.

Early one morning as we were beginning our day's play in the back yard, Jem and I heard something next door in Miss Rachel Haverford's collard patch. We went to the wire fence to see if there was a puppy--Miss Rachel's rat terrier was expecting--instead we found someone sitting looking at us. Sitting down, he wasn't much higher than the collards. We stared at him until he spoke: "Hey." To Kill A Mockingbird - The Books - The Book Club - ABC TV To Kill A Mockingbird Reviewed 07/09/2010 Overview Published in 1960, Harper Lee's novel is set in the Great Depression in the 1930s in a sleepy town in South Alabama. Narrated by young Scout, it explores the white and black communities of the American South. Told with gentle humour, it focuses on religion, racial inequality, and the ambivalence of adult morality. Author Profile PART ONE 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 would we be if he hadn't? We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right. Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings.

All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess. In England, Simon was irritated by the persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more liberal brethren, and as Simon called himself a Methodist, he worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens. Mindful of John Wesley's strictures on the use of many words in buying and selling, Simon made a pile practicing medicine, but in this pursuit he was unhappy lest he be tempted into doing what he knew was not for the glory of God, as the putting on of gold and costly apparel. So Simon, having forgotten his teacher's dictum on the possession of human chattels, bought three slaves and with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River some forty miles above Saint Stephens. He returned to Saint Stephens only once, to find a wife, and with her established a line that ran high to daughters. Simon lived to an impressive age and died rich. It was customary for the men in the family to remain on Simon's homestead, Finch's Landing, and make their living from cotton.

The place was self-sufficient: modest in comparison with the empires around it, the Landing nevertheless produced everything required to sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clothing, supplied by river-boats from Mobile. top ↑ JENNIFER BYRNE: OK, well, now it's time for our classic and Val has brought one of her favourites to the club and what a treat it is - to have an excuse to reread Harper Lee's enduring portrait of steadfast decency in the face of overwhelming ignorance - To Kill A Mockingbird. VOICE-OVER: Set in the deep south of America in the 1930s, To Kill A Mockingbird is a tale told through the eyes of a child, eight-year-old Scout. Her story is of three years in the life of her brother, Jem, and their lawyer father Atticus. One summer, their idyllic life is disrupted by the trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Soon, Scout witnesses an adult world full of prejudice, violence and hypocrisy which not only tests loyalties but places her father at the centre of a desperate struggle for justice.

JENNIFER BYRNE: OK, well, bless you, Val, for giving us this present. Tell us why it has endured so long and so well. VAL MCDERMID: I think there's lots of reasons why it's endured. It deals with big, important issues, it's true. It deals with issues of class, race, it deals with issues about prejudice, about decency, honesty, truth, what it takes to be courageous and stand up for what you believe in. Those are like the big ideas that underpin the book. But what is at the heart of this book is a voice that charms us and draws us in. It's not Scout writing at eight years old, but it's Scout writing, looking back at what it was like to be eight years old and seeing the world through those eyes and...the gradual revelations, the gradual understanding is something I think that draws us in. We've all been children, we've all gone through that experience of suddenly blindly understanding what it is that's happening around. JENNIFER BYRNE: You, I was interested, Pierre. You didn't need to read it again cos it's already part of your soul. It's actually helped shape you.

DBC PIERRE: I feel that that's an incredibly important book, and, remember, I was growing up just over the border from America, largely with American school friends and what have you. So I read it as if I were there in a certain way. And I never, you know... It didn't, at first, occur to me that it was so much about race and courage et cetera - this, for me, was always a look at humanity. And I found it a thing of genius, I was so touched by it. MARIEKE HARDY: Oh, I mean, I think it's a part of... It becomes a part of the soul of everyone who reads it, really. And I mean, I was slightly worried that we were doing it for that exact reason that it might have just been 15 minutes of us all nodding and smiling at each other and saying what a great piece of work it was. So I'm hoping Jason Steger has something quite contentious to state. (LAUGHS) "I loathe this piece of rubbish!" I mean, it's always a mark of a beautiful book when you pick it to pieces in school and it still resonates with you as an adult.

JENNIFER BYRNE: It survived school, yes. MARIEKE HARDY: You don't even approach it with trepidation. You don't even go, "Oh, God! I don't want to go back into that world again cos I wrote countless essays on it. It was just..." I think reading it as an adult, I appreciated much more the sense of place that I missed the first time around. It's just, you are completely within this community from the get-go and you never leave it. It's wonderful. JENNIFER BYRNE: And it completely pulls you in. MARIEKE HARDY: Hmm. JENNIFER BYRNE: The life of Maycomb and the... Yeah, the different people. Fully hated... JASON STEGER: I loathed it. No, no, I loathed it, actually. I think it's... I really, I loathed it, you know. Atticus is too good... No, it's a great book. It's a fantastic book. And I love reading again. I mean, it's a long time since I read it and I was struck by not so much this sort of stuff about racism and preju...

I was struck by the class differences, the stuff she deals with, with the white trash and the Ewells and the Cunninghams who are all characters in it. But also the really deft way that she gets these... She describes some of the characters, some of the old ladies in Maycomb. It's so, so well done. I mean, in a sense, I don't want to still go on about it reminding me of this or that but it did remind me a bit of the accuracy of... The childhood description reminded me very much of Dickens, particularly David Copperfield, the first bit of David Copperfield. And also the way that Harper Lee catches characters in just sort of three or four lines. JENNIFER BYRNE: The old lady line I love, "By nightfall, they were like soft teacakes with frosting, sweat and soft talcum." VAL MCDERMID: And I think one of the things that's important about this book and bringing up again, I mean, yes, we are all probably gonna just sit here and say it's fantastic, it's terrific.

But I think it's important that we carry on introducing this book to the next generation of readers and the next generation of readers because this is a book that I think people can read quite young and it's a book that will open their eyes into thinking about all sorts of different issues. I gave it to my godson a couple of years ago when he was 12, 13 and he read this and he was just jaw-dropped and he was talking about the issues, he was talking about the book, he was talking about the writing for weeks afterwards. And we were actually just away in America in the summer just before I came here and he said to me over breakfast one morning, he said, "Do you know, that's still my favourite book." And I think that... MARIEKE HARDY: Do you think there's actually a fear that it will die out, though? I mean, it has lasted such a long time... VAL MCDERMID: I don't think it's about dying out. I think it's just reminding ourselves that it's there. You know, I mean, there are so many books out there, so many books we all enjoy.

If we're readers, we're always finding new books, enthusing about, "This is the book I read last week," "This is the book I read last month." And sometimes in the slipstream, we forget to say... JENNIFER BYRNE: The old glasses can get lost. VAL MCDERMID: ..that we should still be... JENNIFER BYRNE: But let me put... JASON STEGER: Sorry. No, I was just gonna say, it's important because of what it says but it doesn't do it in a sort of didactic way. It's not preaching it... JENNIFER BYRNE: It's funny! JASON STEGER: And it's great. VAL MCDERMID: It is funny, yes. JENNIFER BYRNE: Very! VAL MCDERMID: That lovely, wry humour that runs through it. DBC PIERRE: Do you know, there's some very interesting facts about Nelle Harper Lee as well? Her own father was a lawyer, her own... I think he was a commercial lawyer but there came a moment when he defended a black man accused of a rape.

These are all things under file, curiously. The file in the law department of that town... which deals with the case he defended has gone missing, just that one, and they suspect it to be perhaps in her research... JENNIFER BYRNE: Really? DBC PIERRE: ..folder somewhere. Yeah. Very interesting stuff. Did you know she was a next door neighbour to Truman Capote? JENNIFER BYRNE: Well, he's Dill... DBC PIERRE: They used to... Yeah, they used to trade little stories together and everything as kids. And I think there's, there's so much, there's... There's a real spring of genuine literary reason... MARIEKE HARDY: The Truman Capote thing is interesting because I told a friend that we were gonna be doing this and I said, you know, "We're all gonna sit and agree." He said, "Of course, you're gonna bring up about the rumour that Truman Capote actually wrote it." And I thought, "That's news to me. I've never heard that rumour before." VAL MCDERMID: It's clear from his own correspondence that he didn't.

I mean, there was a rumour that's going around simply because she's only written the one book and then never written again so everybody goes, "It must have been Truman Capote that wrote it cos just like this dumb woman down in Alabama." But it's clear from Capote's own correspondence and indeed her correspondence with her editor that it wasn't him that wrote it. MARIEKE HARDY: But the second album syndrome thing is an interesting one to think about why she didn't write anything again. I mean, Joseph Heller kept going after Catch-22 although some might argue... JENNIFER BYRNE: Sadly. MARIEKE HARDY: Yes, exactly. Exactly! And I think, what was it someone said to me, when a university lecturer's saying, "You've never written anything as good as Catch-22." And he said, "Yes, but I wrote Catch-22." JASON STEGER: Exactly. MARIEKE HARDY: Which is a great zinger from Joseph Heller. But, I mean, why did she not write again? VAL MCDERMID: Some people have only got one book in them. JASON STEGER: Yes, I suppose that's true.

JENNIFER BYRNE: And if it was like you're saying... DBC PIERRE: Well, she herself said, "I said what I had to say." JENNIFER BYRNE: And... DBC PIERRE: Which is... JENNIFER BYRNE: Drawing so closely on her own life, I mean, you only have one life. DBC PIERRE: That sounded to me like a very well-described slice of exactly where she was and the things that happened to her family and it's clear that Atticus and Boo and everyone is her immediate milieu. JASON STEGER: Well, she's written the perfect book almost. Why would she wanna tarnish her reputation or... DBC PIERRE: She's still alive, she's still there in the town. VAL MCDERMID: And who knows? DBC PIERRE: Her sister is a practising lawyer still. And very tight-lipped. JENNIFER BYRNE: And we ain't gonna get another one. DBC PIERRE: No, I think she... VAL MCDERMID: Yeah, but when she dies, there might be a trunk full of magnificent manuscripts.

MARIEKE HARDY: She's like 2Pac. JENNIFER BYRNE: I would just say, though, for all who have read it, and probably everyone out there has read it, read it again. Read it again. MARIEKE HARDY: I feel like we should all hold hands now. DBC PIERRE: Sing songs. Raise, be healed. VAL MCDERMID: He's among us! JENNIFER BYRNE: That is our club for another month. A big thanks to tonight's book clubbers. Thank you so much to Pierre, to Marieke, to Jason and to Val. And next month. More, I have to say by coincidence than design, we are staying in the American classic icon belt because Brendan Cowell is bringing his favourite, JD Salinger's Catcher In The Rye, to talk about. We will also be looking at Indelible Ink by Fiona McGregor being touted by some as THE book about contemporary Sydney. So lots of treats ahead, also, this month we've got some great interviews with guests of the Melbourne Writers' Festival on the website.

And on the 21st of this month, a special on travel writing on the road featuring William Dalrymple, Tony Wheeler, Cate Kennedy. It's a fantastic show. Do, please, join us for that. And until then, very happy reading. Goodnight. top ↑ This book is superbly written and transports me to a time before mine where things weren't so easy, especially for those suffering oppression. Jen, your comment was racist and ignorant beyond belief. Perhaps the Book Club panel have progressed with the rest of the world on this issue and acknowledge that people are people. The colour of the person reading the book has as little relevance as the colour of the person who wrote the book. Victoria i agree with jen above. the following blog-post discusses the racism in the novel: jn 24 Jan 2011 1:03:24pm This is an all time favourite of mine. Reading this transports me into a different world that I never want to leave. Em The most compelling story of all time. It is a timeless story of racism and ignorance. A theme that seems to continue 40 years on. We need to ask ourselves what have we learnt.

It dosn't seem alot. A simple story that I have shared with my children and pleased that thay have also had to opportunity to study this magnificaent book. Attticus is a master of seeing reason and understanding. This is his legacy to his children. As it shouldbe to all of us. A must read for all ages. Kerrie Levy 05 Nov 2010 8:21:38pm Having read this book at schoo l (which was some time back!) I revisited it recently and was captivated by it. What a great read in every way; timeless. jen 05 Nov 2010 10:54:52am I agree this is a great book, but I was disappointed with the way First Tuesday Book Club fawned all over it without discussing the recent controversies over this book in the USA. In that sense, it was a missed opportunity to discuss how race relations have changed in the past 50 years.

Truth is, many African Americans loathe this book because it's written about racism from a white perspective, with only the most rudimentary characterisation of its few black characters, and with an inevitably heroic white male in the role of rescuer. It's a book about racism in which the victims are frankly absent. For the time it was written, it's difficult to expect much better, and Harper Lee did a fine job in bringing the issue of racism to an enormous readership with sensitivity and poignancy. The book is well written and the subject matter is bold - for those times. However, I would have liked to see First Tuesday Book Club bring on a reviewer with coloured skin, and I was disappointed that there was no discussion of how similar subject matter is handled today. Could a white author get away with telling a story about racism without a more comprehensive character exploration of its victims? If a person of colour wrote such a story from the black perspective today, would it get the same attention? Eirinn 04 Nov 2010 7:36:36pm This is the perfect book, not a single word out of place. I think I've read it 20 times.

The new CD set read by Sissy Spacek is a welcome variation on reading it - especially as I'm afraid I will read it too many times and get sick of it. My life would be poorer for that. Luisa Pauletto

Question: Which book opens with the words “When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow”?
Answer: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD