To Kill A Mockingbird Setting

To Kill a Mockingbird

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and a conscientious stupidity,” said by civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which exemplifies the entirety of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee. In Lee’s novel, she places the setting in Maycomb County, Alabama, in the years 1933 to 1935, the years while the Great Depression, segregation, and Jim Crow laws were taking place in the South; because of this time period, Lee structures the plot to be consumed by issues of racism and judgment towards African Americans. Through her riveting and monumental novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee received the Pulitzer Prize in 1961; in addition, the New York Times called the novel “the best of

Lee has followed up To Kill a Mockingbird with the sequel, Go Set A Watchman (2015). In To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee adopts the persona of an adult white woman named Jean-Louise “Scout” Finch, and is writing the story from the viewpoint of her younger self, recalling when she was just starting to explore and recognize the society around her, which was Maycomb County. Scout, a fiery, un-ladylike little girl, is judged for her preference of overalls and playing outside, but is loved deeply by those who know her and her family. She has the opportunity to understand current societal issues through her brother Jem and her father Atticus Finch, who is constantly teaching his children that all men are created equal and therefore all men should be treated equally. Finch, during the novel, is judged severely by his neighbors and friends for defending a (clearly innocent, in the eyes of the Finches and others of the town who understand the truth) black man against a rape charge of a white nineteen-year-old woman, and this affects Jem and Scout by allowing them to see what type of society they live

Lee’s themes and points in the novel are very well written and understandable. Throughout the book, Lee shows how Scout, Jem, and Dill mature through the actions and situations around them. One example is when Scout makes the connection about the mockingbird sin: When Scout and Jem first got air rifles for Christmas, they were told they could shoot all the birds they wanted, except mockingbirds because it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. The reason it was a sin, as explained by Miss Maudie on page 94, was because “mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” What she is saying is that mockingbirds do not do anything destructive to the human race, but rather give humans songs of sweetness to listen to. The connection Scout makes is at the end of the novel, on page 279, where she makes the connection that Tom Robinson and Boo Radley are like mockingbirds, the way they helped others but were still shot down through the judgment of society; through this, Lee implies that a society who judges is a