The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Adult readers may focus so much on the novel's politics that they might neglect the coming-of-age story. What does Scout learn, and how does she change in the course of her narrative? Discussion Question Thirteen
Discussion Question Twelve
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
What elements of this novel did you find funny, memorable, or inspiring? Are there any characters whose beliefs or actions impressed or surprised you? Did any events lead you to revisit childhood memories or see them in a new light?
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Discussion Question Number Eleven
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Why does Atticus Finch risk his reputation, his friendships, and her career to take Tom Robinson's case? Do you think he risks too much by putting his children in harm's way?
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Discussion Question Number Ten
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Since their mother is dead, several women--Calpurnia, Miss Maudie, and Aunt Alexandra--function as mother figures to Scout and Jem. Discuss the ways these three women influence Scout's growing understanding of what it means to be a Southern "lady."
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Discussion Question Number Nine
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
What does Jem learn when Atticus forces him to read to Mrs. Dubose as a punishment? Why does the lawyer regard this woman as the "bravest person" he ever knew?
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Discussion Question Number Eight
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
How does Atticus quietly protest Jim Crow laws even before Tom Robinson's trial?
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Discussion Question Number Seven
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Atticus believes that to understand life from someone else's perspective, we must walk in his or her shoes. From what other perspectives does Scout see her fellow townspeople?
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Discussion Question Number Six
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
The novel takes place during the Great Depression. How do the class divisions and family quarrels heighten racial tensions in Maycomb?
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Discussion Question Number Five
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Atticus teaches Scout that compromise is not bending the law, but "an agreement reached by mutual consent." Does she apply or reject this definition of compromise? What are examples of her obedience to and defiance of this principle?
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Discussion Question Number Four
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
How does the town of Maycomb function as a character with its own personality, rather than merely as a backdrop for the novel's events?
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Discussion Question Number Three
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
How does Boo Radley's past history of violence foreshadow his method of protecting Jem and Scout? Does this aggression make him more, or less, of a sympathetic character?
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Discussion Question Number Two
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Why does the adult Scout begin her narrative with Jem's broken arm and a brief family history?
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Discussion Question Number One
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Why do you think Harper Lee chose as her novel's epigraph this quote from Charles Lamb: "Lawyer, I suppose, were children once"?
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
To Adapt a Mockingbird
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
The story of bringing To Kill a Mockingbird to the screen is--as with any great film adaptation--the story of an awful movie trying to unsuccessfully to be made.
After Universal Studios bought the rights to Lee's novel, they first offered Rock Hudson the role of Atticus Finch. But producer Alan Pakula didn't want Hudson for the part; he wanted Gregory Peck. When Pakula sent a copy of the novel to Peck, the tall, dignified Californian read it in one night and accepted, and the studio agreed to finance the film.
With Peck on board, the next piece of business was turning the novel into a screenplay. Pakula offered Harper Lee the chance to write it, but she wasn't interested. She pleaded responsibility to her second novel and, with characteristic humility, said she would welcome an experienced screenwriter's trimming.
When playwright Horton Foote landed the screenplay assignment instead, all worded out for the best. Foote's upbringing in a small Texas town and knack for scenes of quiet dramatic intensity were ideal for the project. At Pakula's urging, Foote compressed the novel;s three years into one in order to give the film a sense of unity. As Foote has said, " That decision was very freeing to me. It gave me a chance to explore the architecture that she had created for the novel and not feel that I was ruining anything or tampering anything essential." He also heightened the intensity of the novel's social criticism, reflecting the growing momentum of the Civil Rights Movement.
In spite of these and other significant changes, Lee later praised Foote's screenplay: "If the integrity of a film adaptation is measured by the degree to which the novelist's intent is preserved, Mr. Foote's screenplay should be studied as a classic."
Next, the producers had to find the perfect set for Maycomb, Alabama. They wanted to film in Lee's native Monroeville, which between the book's setting in 1935 and the shoot in 1961 had lost much of it architectural charm. Wisely, the design team instead transplanted a street of shotgun shacks to the studio back lot, and recreated Maycomb in Southern California.
The set designers would win Academy Awards for their work, as would Peck and Foote. Nominations went to actress Mary Badham, cinematographer Russell harlan, and composer Elmer Bernstein. The picture itself lost only to Lawrence of Arabia.
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
How the Novel Came to be Written
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Any claims for To Kill a Mockingbird as a book that changed history could not have seen more farfetched one winter night in 1958, as Nelle Harper Lee huddled in her outer-borough New York City 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. Lippincott's formidable Tay Hohoff promptly sent her outside to gather all the pages back--the rescuing To Kill a Mockingbird from yet another slush pile.
The novel had its origins in Lee's hometown of Monoroeville, Alabama--the small, Southern town upon which the fictional Maycomb is based. Her father's unsuccessful defense of a black man and his son accused of murder, in addition to the Scottboro 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 nurtured Lee's sensibility as surely as his respect for law. Lee would name her 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. This arguably marked an improvement over her first title, Go Set a Watchman, but once she fastened on To Kill a Mockingbird she did not look back.
Lippincott finally published the book on July 11, 1960, by which time an unprecedented four national mail-order book clubs had already selected the novel for its 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-eight 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. Once 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.
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Historical Context: The Jim Crow South
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Former slaves and their children had little assurance that their post-Civil War freedoms would stick. By the 1890s, a system of laws and regulations commonly referred to as "Jim Crow" had emerged; by 1910, every stat of the former Confederacy had upheld this legalized segregation and disenfranchisement. Most scholars believe the term originated around 1830. when a white minstrel performer blackened his face, danced a jig, and sang the lyrics to the song "Jump Jim Crow." At first the word was synonymous with such then-innocuous terms as black, colored, or Negro, but it later became attached to this specific arsenal of repressive laws.
During the Jim Crow era, local officials instituted curfews for blacks and posted "Whites Only" and "Colored" signs on parks, schools, hotels, water fountains, restrooms, and all modes of transportation. Laws against miscegenation or "race-mixing" deemed all marriages between white and black not only void but illegal. Almost as bas as the injustice of Jim Crow was the inconsistency with which local law enforcement applied it. Backtalk would rate a laugh in one town, a lynching just over the county line.
Through the use of violence to subjugate black was nothing new, its character changed under Jim Crow. Southern white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan reached a membership of six million. Mob violence was encouraged, Torture became a public spectacle. Some white families brought their children as witnesses to lynchings, and vendors hawked the body parts of victims as souvenirs. Between 1889 and 1930, over 3,700 men and women were reported lynched in the United States, many for challenging Jim Crow.
All this anger and fear led to the notorious trials of the Scottsboro Boys (1931-1937), an ordeal of sensational convictions, reversals, and retrials for nine young African American men accused of raping two white women on a train from Tennessee to Alabama. The primary testimony came from the older woman, a prostitute trying to avoid prosecution herself.
Juries composed exclusively of white men ignored clear evidence that the women had suffered no injury. As in To Kill a Mockingbird, a black man charged with raping a white woman was not accorded the presumption of innocence. In January of 1932, the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed seven out of eight death sentences against the adult defendants. A central figure in the case was an Atticus-like judge, James E. Horton, a member of the Alabama Bar who eventually defied public sentiment to overturn a guilty verdict.
Despite these and many more injustices, black Americans found ingenious ways to endure and resist. Education, religion, and music became their solace and salvation until, in the organized political action of the Civil Rights Movement, Jim Crow's harsh music finally began to fade.
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Friendship of Harper Lee and Truman Capote
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Nelle Harper Lee and Truman Capote became friends in the early 1930s as kindergartners in Monroeville, Alabama. They lived next door to each other: Capote with aunts and uncles, Lee with her parents and three siblings.
From the start they loved reading and recognized each other "an apartness," as Capote later expressed it. When Lee's father gave them an old Underwood typewriter, they began writing original stories. Although Capote moved to New York City in the third grade to join his mother and stepfather, he returned to Monoroeville most summers, eventually providing the inspiration for Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.
In 1948 Capote published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Around that time, Lee quit law school and joined Capote in New York to work at becoming a writer too. Years of menial jobs followed until To Kill a Mockingbird was ready for publication. Capote read the manuscript and made editorial suggestions. Lee, in her turn, accompanied him to Kansas to help research In Cold Blood.
After To Kill a Mockingbird was published, Capote resented Lee's success, and could have tried harder to dispel baseless rumors that the novel was as much his work as hers. Their friendship continued during the 1960s and '70s, but Capote's drug and alcohol abuse had strained it. Later he would stop publishing and sink into self-parody, sponging off high society and making endless rounds of the talk-show circuit. When Capote died in 1984, Lee confided to friends that she had not heard from him in years.
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
To Kill a Mockingbird and Civil Rights - The mid-1960s
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, enforcing the constitutional right to vote.
Malcolm X is assassinated in 1965.
Despite rumors of a second Southern novel, Lee never finishes another book. This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
To Kill a Mockingbird and Civil Rights - The early 1960s
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
To Kill a Mockingbird is published on July 11, 1960.
The film follows in 1962 and wins Oscars for best actor, screenwriter, and set design.
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a Dream" speech delivered, 1963. He wins the Nobel peace Prize in 1964.
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
To Kill a Mockingbird and Civil Rights - The 1950s
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Brown v. Board of Education rules school segregation unconstitutional.
Rosa Parks refuses to surrender her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.
Lee accompanies Truman Capote to Kansas as "researchist" for his book In Cold Blood.
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
To Kill a Mockingbird and Civil Rights - The 1940s
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Jackie Robinson signs a baseball contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers, 1947.
President Truman ends segregation in the military and discrimination in federal hiring.
Harper Lee moves to New York City to become a writer.
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
To Kill a Mockingbird and Civil Rights - The 1930s
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Over 25% of labor force is unemployed during worst years of Great Depression.
Franklin D. Roosevelt wins the presidency with promise of his "New Deal" in 1932.
The Scottsboro Boys' trials last from 1931-37. Nelle Harper Lee is 6 years old when they begin.
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Harper Lee (b. 1926)
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
If Nelle Harper Lee ever wanted proof that fame has its drawbacks, she didn't have to look farther than her childhood neighbor, Truman Capote. After her enormously successful first novel, her life has been as private as Capote's was public.
Nelle--her first names is her grandmother's spelled backward--was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. Her mother, Frances Cunningham Finch Lee, was a homemaker. her father, Amasa Cole Lee, practiced law. Before A. C. Lee became a title lawyer, he once defended two black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. Both clients, a father and son, were hanged.
As a child, Harper Lee was an unruly tomboy. She fought on the playground. She talked back to teachers. She was bored with school and resisted any sort of conformity. The character of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird would have liked her. In high school Lee was fortunate to have a gifted English teacher, Gladys Watson Burkett, who introduced her to challenging literature and the rigors of writing well. Lee loved 19th-century British authors best, and once said that her ambition was to become "the Jane Austen of south Alabama."
Unable to fit in with the sorority she joined at the University of Alabama, she found a second home on the campus newspaper. Eventually she became editor-in-chief of the Rammer Jammer, a quarterly humor magazine on campus. She entered the law school, but she "loathed" it. Despite her father's hopes that she would become a local attorney like her sister Alice, Lee went to New York to pursue her writing.
She spent eight years working odd jobs before she finally showed a manuscript to Tay Hohoff, and editor at J.B. Lippincott. At this point, it still resembled a string of stores more than the novel Lee had intended. Under Hohoff's guidance, two and a half years of rewriting followed. When the novel was finally ready for publication, the author opted for the name "Harper Lee" on the cover, because she didn't want to be misidentified as "Nellie."
To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 to highly favorable reviews and quickly climbed the bestseller lists, where it remained for 88 weeks. In 1961, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize.
Though fans of the book waited for a second novel, it never came. Lee later researched a book, similar to Capote's In Cold Blood, about a part-time minister in Alexander City, Alabama, accused of killing five people for their insurance money and later himself murdered by a victim's relative. She dropped the project in the 1990s.
In the meantime, To Kill a Mockingbird has sold more than 30 million copies in 18 languages. According to biographer Charles J. Shields, Lee was unprepared for the amount of personal attention associated with writing a bestseller. Ever since, she has led a quiet and guardedly private life. As Sheriff Tate says of Boo Radley, "draggin' him with his shy ways into the limelight--to me, that's a sin." So it would be with Harper Lee. From her, To Kill a Mockingbird is gift enough.
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Introduction to the Novel
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird begins at the end. "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow," write the now-grown Jean Louise "Scout" Finch in the novel's first sentence. By the time Jem finally gets around to breaking his arm more than 250 pages later, most readers will have forgotten they were warned. This echoes the way the whole book unfolds--in no special hurry, with life indirection. 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 woman. Atticus suspects he will lose the case, but he faces 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 childrens' fear of their mysterious neighbor. She illustrates the second with Atticus' 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 had done exactly that--guessed at the pain not only beneath Tom Robinson's black skin, but also under the fishbelly pallor of her neighbor.
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Preface
The following text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is the rare American novel that can be discovered with excitement in adolescence and reread into adulthood without fear of disappointment. Few novels so appealingly evoke the daily world of childhood in a way that seems convincing whether you are sixteen or sixty-six.
Lee tells two deftly paired stories set in a small Southern town: one focused on lawyer Atticus Finch's defense of an unjustly accused man, the other on his bright, bratty daughter's gradual discovery of her own goodness. For many young people this novel becomes their first big read, the grown-up story that all later books will be measured against.
The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to revitalize the role of literary reading in American popular culture. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, a 2004 NEA report, identified a critical decline in reading for pleasure among American adults. The Big Read aims to address this issue directly by providing citizens with the opportunity to read and discuss a single book within their communities.
A great book combines enlightenment with enchantment. It awakens our imagination and enlarges our humanity. It can even offer harrowing insights that somehow console and comfort us. Whether you're a regular reader already or a nonreader making up for lost time, thank you for being part of the Big Read.
Dana Gioia
Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts
This text is excerpted from The Big Read's Reader's Guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
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