To Kill a Mocking Bird - Paper 15

TITLE: To Kill A Mockingbird
AUTHOR: Harper Lee
GENRE: Novel
Date of Publication: 1960’s

Plot
“To Kill a mockingbird” by Harper Lee is set in the town of Maycomb, Alabama, in the middle of the Great Depression.The narrator, six-year-old Scout Finch, lives with her older brother Jem and their widowed father Atticus, a middle-aged lawyer. The three are terrified by, and fascinated with, their neighbor, the reclusive “Boo” Radley. Atticus is assigned to defend a black man named Tom Robinson, who has been accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a young white woman. Although many of Maycomb’s people disapprove, Atticus agrees to defend Tom to the best of his ability.
Atticus establishes that the are lying. It also becomes clear that the friendless Mayella was making sexual advances towards Tom and that her father caught her in the act. Despite significant evidence of Tom’s innocence, he is convicted. Jem’s faith in justice is badly shaken, as is Atticus, when a hopeless Tom is hot and killed while trying to escape from prison. Bob Ewell is humiliated by the trial and vows revenge. Finally, he attacks the defenseless Jem and Scout as they walk home from a Halloween pageant at their school. Jem’s arm is broken in struggle, but some comes to their rescue. The mysterious man carries Jem home, where Scout eventually recognizes him as the reclusive Boo Radley.

SETTING
It is set in Southern town of Maycomb in the 1930s when poverty and unemployment were common in the United States. The Great Depression meant only that the bad times that had been going on for years got a sightly worse. These rural areas had long been poor and undeveloped. Black people worked for low wages in the fields all day. Despite its civic it is a place where time seems to stand still. 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.”

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