To Kill a Mockingbird
by
Harper Lee
100 Most Challenged Books
Lee, H. (1960). To kill a
mockingbird. New York, NY:
Grand Central Publishing.
EXPOSITION: A woman named Scout is remembering events from her childhood, when she lived with her brother Jem and their lawyer father Atticus in a small Southern town. Scout, Jem and their friend Dill spend their summers trying to find out about a mysterious recluse named Boo Radley who lives in their neighborhood.
CONFLICT: When Atticus, a lawyer, agrees to defend a Negro named Tom Robinson who is accused of raping a white girl, the neighbors call him a “nigger-lover.” The children are likewise being taunted by the community, but they stand by their father. However, someone keeps doing mysteriously kind things for Jem and Scout, like leaving gifts where they can find them.
RISING ACTION: One evening, Atticus goes to the jail to face down a mob determined to hang Tom. They are both saved when Scout arrives and naively starts talking to the men in the lynch mob with a childlike innocence that makes them leave.
CLIMAX: At the trial, Atticus proves that Tom Robinson is innocent, but the all-white jury convicts him anyway. Bob Ewell, the father of the white girl who falsely accused Tom swears revenge against Atticus for humiliating him and his daughter in court.
FALLING ACTION: On Hallowen night, Jem and Scout are walking to a party when someone attacks them, but they are mysteriously rescued. Later, at home, Scout finds out that their assailant was Bob Ewell, who broke Jem’s arm and almost killed Scout before he was stabbed to death with his own knife.
RESOLUTION: Scout sees Boo Radley hiding in Jem’s room and she realizes that he was the one who saved them, and he was the one who had been giving them secret gifts all along. She suggests to Atticus and the sheriff that it would be wrong to punish Boo for his kindness to them just like it would be wrong “to kill a mockingbird” because it sings sweetly and does no harm to anyone.
LIST TWO STRONG LITERARY QUALITIES DISPLAYED IN THE BOOK AND WRITE ONE SENTENCE ABOUT EACH QUALITY:
One strong literary quality I particularly liked was the way Harper Lee managed to write this book with the eloquent articulation of an adult author while still narrating the story with the innocent simplicity of the childlike central character.
I was also impressed with the many bits of local color the author infused into the tale, which made me feel transported in time and space so I was right there experiencing it instead of merely reading about it.
PICTURE SOURCES: allposters.com
greenville.ebayclassifieds.com
madmikesamerica.com
netstate.com
biography.com
I first read this book when I was a child of 9 because I felt I had much in common with the title character. We both lived along the banks of the Mississippi River – Huck in St. Petersburg, Missouri and me in Davenport, Iowa. We both had good friends who were black, and we both didn’t care much for school. I always remembered how much I loved Mark Twain’s story. However, as an adult, I kept hearing how the book was criticized as being racist, which puzzled me since I did not recall that at all from my childhood reading. So, when the opportunity to reread this book presented itself in this course, I jumped at the opportunity to see if my adult perspective would be any different from my childhood impression.
It wasn’t. In fact, I can understand now more than ever why this story is generally considered a classic of American literature. In a way, it seems Mark Twain was almost prophetic in discussing social issues that are so prevalent in our day and age, including: domestic violence (Pap’s mistreatment of Huck), gang warfare (the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons), con artists (identity theft), and alcoholism (Boggs).
Of course, the book’s contemporary critics seem to overlook all of its positive elements in order to condemn it because of its use of the word “nigger” and its depiction of the slave named Jim. We should remember that Jim had the courage to escape his bondage. If we honor slaves like Harriet Tubman for doing this, why should we condemn Mark Twain for having Jim for do the same? The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is generally credited with being the first American novel to truthfully employ the vernacular in depicting how the characters spoke. The word “nigger” was a common part of speech in 1884 when Mark Twain first published his work. To judge Twain’s book written centuries ago by modern standards and subsequently condemning it is like condemning George Washington for recommending in 1790 that the new and struggling United States should always avoid all possible contact with foreign countries while we are presently sending earthquake relief to Japan. Times change. While it is certainly wrong to use “nigger’ or any other word as a racial slur, for one group to decide that any book using that one word should be completely banned violates our freedoms under the Bill of Rights and brings to mind another time in recent history when books that were condemned by one group were banned – and burned. 
The old saying goes “Opposites attract.” But the little known second-half of that truism is “Alikes adhere.” And so it was with the way an outcast little girl and a homeless scruffy dog became instant friends. Almost every one of us has likewise felt like the outcast ugly duckling at some point in our lives, so this is one more way readers can understand the book’s central characters – whether they have two feet or four. This comes from someone who used to weight 100 pounds more than he does now and who got his cat from Death Row at the pound. Winn-Dixie would be the dog 
