Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

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In To Kill a Mockingbird, we are told the story of the lives of the Finch family through the eyes of one Jean Louise “Scout” Finch. She is around the age of eight years old, so she is very young. Essentially, she has always wanted to go to school, but when she gets there, she finds that her education level surpasses that of the first grade. Her father forces her to stay in school. That summer she meets a peculiar person who calls himself Dill, although his name is Charles Baker Harris. Scout and her brother, Jem, quickly befriend him. He becomes obsessed with the house down the street, so Jem tells him the story of Arthur “Boo” Radley; he never comes out. Some say he’s dead, but Calpurnia, the Finches’ housekeeper, won’t believe it until the day she sees a funeral carriage arrive at the house. Dill begins planning how he will get Boo to come out of the house, but his plans are not followed through that summer. In subsequent years, Dill and Jem try many things to get Mr. Radley to come out of his house, but absolutely none of them succeeds. Scout, however, finds that she has had a very close encounter with him; while her neighbor’s house was burning, Scout was forced to remain outside. It was the dead of winter, so she was violently cold. When she comes back into her own house, Atticus, her father, sees that she has a blanket around her that wasn’t there before, and most certainly did not belong to the Finch family. They discover that her back was turned to the Radley house the entire time, and that it must have been Arthur that had given her the blanket. Atticus’ role as the town’s best lawyer comes into play when he is asked to defend a Negro man in a court of law. The man is accused of raping the daughter of one Mr. Bob Ewell; the Ewell family is considered to be the scum of the town. They are equally hated and pitied by everyone; they pity the children but despise the father. Bob is an alcoholic who has no job. He gets relief checks from the government, but spends it all on liquor. The trial lasts for all of two days, but the process leading to the trial took at least a year.

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