To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is Harper Lee's only published novel during her lifetime and one of the most widely read American novels of the twentieth century. Set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression, it is narrated by Jean Louise 'Scout' Finch, who looks back on three formative years of her childhood (roughly 1933-1935). The novel weaves together two storylines: the children's fascination with their reclusive neighbour Arthur 'Boo' Radley, and their father Atticus Finch's defence of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman.

Setting

Maycomb is a small, insular Southern town where racial segregation is the unquestioned norm and social hierarchies are rigid. Lee uses the claustrophobic smallness of the town - where everyone knows everyone else's business - to show how prejudice is sustained by community pressure and tradition rather than individual malice. The courthouse, the Radley house and the Finch home form the novel's symbolic geography.

The central movement

Part One introduces Scout, her brother Jem and their friend Dill as they act out fantasies about Boo Radley, while Atticus prepares to defend Tom Robinson. Part Two follows the trial, in which Atticus methodically exposes the lies of Bob and Mayella Ewell but cannot overcome the all-white jury's racial prejudice: Tom is convicted. The consequences unfold swiftly - Tom is shot dead attempting to escape, and Bob Ewell, humiliated at trial, attacks Scout and Jem on a dark night. Boo Radley emerges from his house to save the children, killing Ewell. The novel ends with Scout standing on the Radley porch, finally seeing the world from Boo's perspective.

Why it matters for the exam

For OxfordAQA Paper 1 Section A (closed book, prose fiction), you must analyse Lee's narrative methods: how the child narrator creates both innocence and irony, how the Boo Radley and Tom Robinson plots mirror each other as stories about prejudice, and how Atticus embodies the novel's moral argument. This guide gives you chapter-by-chapter coverage, characters, themes, grounded quotations and full exam practice.