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.