To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee chose to narrate Tom Robinson's story through Scout — a white child — rather than through Tom Robinson himself. What does this choice cost the novel? What does it enable?

Atticus uses mockingbird imagery to define innocence: 'it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.' But Tom Robinson is not the only mockingbird in the novel. Who else qualifies? What makes something or someone a 'mockingbird'?

Lee published the novel in 1960 but set it in 1933-35. What does writing about the near past allow that writing about the present does not? How does the historical distance shape the novel's critique?

Tom Robinson is absent from most of the novel — we see him only in the trial chapters, and only in the context of his accusation. What does the novel lose by not giving Tom Robinson interiority? Is this a failure of craft, of imagination, or of the novel's chosen perspective?

Atticus tells Scout that 'the one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.' The jury's majority ruled against Tom Robinson. How does the novel reconcile Atticus's faith in individual conscience with a legal system that produces mass injustice?

Miss Gates teaches about Hitler's persecution of Jews while herself being complicit in Tom Robinson's persecution. What is Lee saying about the human capacity for selective moral vision? Is Miss Gates a hypocrite, or is her contradiction something more systemic?

Heck Tate decides to cover up Boo Radley's killing of Bob Ewell. Atticus, who insists on legal honesty, ultimately accepts this. Is Tate's decision just? Does it undermine Atticus's moral authority that he agrees to it?

The Scottsboro Boys case (1931-1937) — nine Black men falsely accused of raping two white women — is the direct historical model for Tom Robinson. Read a summary of the Scottsboro case. What details did Lee change, and why? What do the changes reveal about the novel's purposes?

Calpurnia code-switches — speaking Standard English at the Finch house and Black Southern vernacular at her church. Scout is surprised. Why? What does Scout's surprise reveal about how she (and the novel) understands Calpurnia's interior life?

In 2020, several school districts banned To Kill a Mockingbird not because it is racist but because the repeated use of racial slurs causes harm to Black students who must encounter them in a classroom. Do you think a novel can be both anti-racist and harmful? How should schools handle this tension?

Scout disperses the lynch mob by speaking to Walter Cunningham Sr. about his entailment case. Why does this work? What does it say about the nature of mob violence — and about the cure for it?

Go Set a Watchman (2015), the novel Lee wrote before Mockingbird, features an Atticus who attends Citizens' Council meetings and opposes integration. Does knowing this change how you read Atticus in Mockingbird? Which version is 'real'?

The novel is set during the Depression, and economic anxiety shapes its social dynamics: the Cunninghams' honorable poverty, the Ewells' degradation, the gap between the professional class and farm workers. How does economic precarity function in enabling or resisting racial injustice?

Tom Robinson's fatal flaw at trial is saying he 'felt sorry' for Mayella Ewell. A Black man expressing pity for a white woman is treated as a social atrocity. What does this reveal about how racial hierarchy controls the vocabulary of human emotion?

Compare Atticus Finch to a real civil rights lawyer of the era — Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown v. Board of Education, or Samuel Leibowitz, who defended the Scottsboro Boys. How does the fictional Atticus compare to real lawyers who fought racial injustice? What does the comparison reveal about the novel's idealism?

Aunt Alexandra represents a vision of Southern womanhood that is explicitly opposed to Atticus's values. Yet she is not a villain — she arranges the Missionary Circle meeting, she comforts Miss Maudie, she even has a moment of dignity after Tom Robinson's death. Compare Alexandra to a character who enforces social conformity in another novel you have read. What does Lee gain by making the enforcer of unjust norms fully human rather than simply villainous?

Lee uses Dill's outsider perspective to notice things Maycomb insiders cannot see clearly. Dill is never given a stable home, a family that attends to him, or a community that knows him. What does the novel NOT show us about Dill's inner life that it shows us about Scout and Jem? What do we lose by having Dill as a peripheral rather than central consciousness?

Compare To Kill a Mockingbird to Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. Both center on a lawyer's defense of a Black man falsely accused in Alabama. What does Stevenson's nonfiction account of real cases reveal about the assumptions embedded in Lee's fictional one? Does fiction or nonfiction better serve the cause of racial justice?

Mrs. Dubose is a racist who uses ugly language against the Finch children. Atticus calls her 'the bravest person I ever knew' because she fought her morphine addiction. Is Atticus right to separate her racism from her courage? Can a person's bravery in one domain redeem ugliness in another?

In 2026, what would Tom Robinson's trial look like on social media? Would Scout's testimony disperse the mob on Twitter? Would the trial's outcome be different with a camera in the courtroom?

Scout ends the novel by seeing Maycomb from Boo Radley's porch — 'I had never seen our neighborhood from this angle.' How does physical perspective in this scene mirror the novel's central moral lesson about empathy?

Compare To Kill a Mockingbird to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Both use child narrators to expose adult racism. Both have been banned and celebrated for the same reasons. What does the child narrator allow that an adult narrator cannot? What does it prevent?

The women who attend the Missionary Circle meeting discuss the 'tragic' lives of Mruna tribespeople in Africa while being entirely comfortable with the racial oppression of Black Alabamans they know personally. What is Lee saying about the relationship between distance and empathy?

Harper Lee helped Truman Capote research In Cold Blood (1966), a book about a brutal murder and the execution of two men. Capote also based the character of Idabel Tompkins in Other Voices, Other Rooms on Lee. How does the Lee-Capote friendship illuminate both of their works?

The jury in Tom Robinson's trial deliberates for hours — much longer than typical for a Black defendant in 1930s Alabama. What does this extended deliberation mean? Is it evidence of hope, or just evidence that Atticus made the facts too obvious to dismiss quickly?

Lee's title comes from the mockingbird speech: 'it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.' But the title applies the metaphor to the entire novel before the metaphor appears. What does beginning with the title's conclusion do to our reading? Is the novel's argument announced before it begins?

Is To Kill a Mockingbird a novel about race, or a novel about empathy that uses race as its context? Does the distinction matter?

Atticus says: 'You just hold your head high and keep those fists down.' He is asking Scout to absorb insults without retaliating. Is this moral courage or an instruction to accept oppression? Does the answer differ depending on who is being asked?

The novel ends with Atticus sitting beside his injured son through the night. By 2026, readers encountering the novel in the wake of ongoing racial injustice, police violence, and mass incarceration might ask: does the novel's faith in fathers in the dark — in individual moral decency — get us anywhere? Is personal virtue an adequate response to systemic injustice?

To Kill a Mockingbird was written by a white woman, centered on a white family, set in a community where Black characters suffer but are not centered. In 2026, would this book be published as written? What does the answer to that question reveal about changes in American publishing and racial discourse?