Summary of "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Jean Louis is an eight-year-old girl who is also called Scout. She and her brother Jeremy live with their father in the town Maycomb. The two of them have lots of fun during their summer holidays, but there is one scary thing in their neighborhood that occupies their minds more than anything else. Their neighbor's house is a scary place that they always run quickly past. In there lives a person that they have never seen - Boo Radley - because for some mysterious reason he never goes outside.

Scout's father is lawyer and she is telling the reader about an episode that happend in the little town a few years back, when her father had to defend a black man who was accused of raping a white woman. This was something that introduced the two children to the adult life with its harsh reality, injustice and racism in the USA during the 1930s. At that time only white men were allowed in the jury. Everything in the novel is presented from the young girl's point of view, but she is a very intelligent girl and she doesn't miss much, so this is not a problem for the reader.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. The book is a classic and was quite ok to read. If you want to read it then do so, but if you don't, then you won't miss much. The book is dealing with things you see on tv all the time (trials, injustice, racism), and it wasn't all that special as I first would have hoped.

Book Summaries

Fiction
Health
Psychology
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Awards

Book Awards

Man Booker Prize
Nobel Prize
Pulitzer Prize