To Kill a Mockingbird

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This article is the Crossover Fiction, African American, Historical, and Big Read categories.

A printable pdf of this booklist is available here

Suggestions for Further Reading

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Watch the prize-winning You Tube Contest entry, describing To Kill A Mockingbird and The Big Read.

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." (Chapter 3)

Ways to experience the story of To Kill A Mockingbird:

  • Read it! We have copies of the novel in the Adult and Young Adult fiction sections.
  • Listen to it! We have audio versions on CD
  • Watch it! We have the movie on DVD.

For more information on the novel as literature, try

Readings on To Kill A Mockingbird edited by Terry O'Neill 

What's in a name?   Harper Lee chose the name of Atticus after 
Titus Pomponius Atticus, a friend of the Roman   orator Cicero, who
was renowed, as Lee said, as "a wise, learned & humane man." 
Finch was one of Lee's mother's names. (So was Cunningham!)

About the Author

Nelle Harper Lee was born April 28, 1926, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for To Kill a Mockingbird -- her only major work to date. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 for her contribution to literature. Other past winners of the Medal of Freedom for literature have been Carl Sandburg, Ralph Ellison, John Steinbeck, and Tennessee Williams.

Learn more about Harper Lee in the biography by Charles Shields: Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. Harper Lee was childhood friends with the writer Truman Capote and accompanied him to Kansas while he researched his book In Cold Blood. The character Dill in To Kill A Mockingbird is said to have been inspired by Capote as a child, and Lee in turn inspired the character Idabel in Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms. Try also The Complete Stories of Truman Capote, some of which are autobiographical, or the fictionalized account of Nelle and Truman's relationship in the novel Capote in Kansas by Kim Powers. 

What do you think? --  Harper Lee loved 19th-century British authors best, and once said that
her ambition was to become "the Jane Austen of Southern Alabama." What do you think of the
comparison?

Novels Dealing with Civil Rights & Justice

  • Blood on the Leavesby Jeff Stetson :an African American prosecutor in Jackson, Miss. finds himself prosecuting a civil rights leader accused of killing whites that were acquitted of hate crimes.
Set in the South in the 1950's, four friends find their lives changed forever when a carefree summer takes a violent turn.
On the run from the law after being falsely accused of murder, a troubled WWI veteran joines forces with an African American who has also been wrongly accused.
In 1948 Louisiana, a young teacher, asked to impart his pride and learning to a young black man awaiting execution, comes face to face with his own cynicism and hopelessness.
A racist beating in a small Mississippi town riples through generations, changing the lives of everyone involved with the incident. 
Lane Cake  --  Stephanie Crawford has been after Miss Maudie for her recipe 
for Lane Cake for thirty years. Lane Cake, a white or yellow layer cake covered with
coconut, nuts, and dried fruits, is said to have originated in Clayton, Alabama, when
its creator, Emma Rylander Lane, won a prize for it in the state fair in the 1890's. For
a recipe for this type of cake and other delicacies that the bridge ladies might have 
enjoyed, look in non-fiction 641.5975 for cookbooks with Southern recipes. Edna Lewis' 
Gift of Southern Cooking has a recipe for Lane Cake.

Novels Dealing with Race & Identity In Rural or Small-Town Southern Settings

"The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow." (Chapter 23)

Interracial marriage in the rural south of today as seen through the eyes of 10-year-old Clover, who is raised by a white step-mom despite protests from relatives.
Growing up in Alabama in the 1950's, two inseparable 10-year-old girls, one black and one white, discover the theft of money meant for polio victims and expose a racial injustice.
After her "stand-in-mother" insults the three biggest racists in town, Lily Owens and bold, black Rosaleen escape to Tiburon, South Carolina where they are taken in by bee-keeping sisters.

Similar Coming of Age Novels

"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."
    (Chapter 10)

Did You Know? -- Thomas Jefferson kept pet mockingbirds while at the White House and at Monticello. One favorite,
whom Jefferson named Dick, rode around on his shoulder. Mockinbirds in the United States are of the species Mimus 
polyglottos and are known for mimicking other birds' songs. If you want to know more, try 
Know Your Bird Sounds: Songs and Calls of Yard, Garden and City Birds by Lang Elliott or try field guides to
North American birds  in nonfiction under *598.2

Historical Context

"Cry about the simple hell people give other people -- without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they're people, too." (Chapter 20)

In the book, Scout is the same age as Harper Lee was in the early 1930's, during the trial of the "Scottsboro Boys." This case and that of Emmett Till both display prevalent Southern attitudes about race during this time period.

Scottsboro Boys

Emmett Till

  • Death of Innocence by Mamie Till-Mobley & Christopher Benson

More about the time period and Civil Rights

  • Alabama: a History by Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton

Or browse in nonfiction 323 for more Civil Rights material. 

The Movie -- The movie To Kill a Mockingbird was released just a year after
the book came out. Gregory Peck played Atticus Finch and won the Oscar for Best Actor in 
1962. The film was nominated for
Best Picture but lost to Lawrence of Arabia which is also available at the library.

For Younger Readers

Share the To Kill A Mockingbird experience with younger readers with these books which explore similar themes: In Young Adult Fiction by Author

  • The $66 Summer by John Armistead
  • Dangerous Skies by Suzanne Staples
  • Sonny's House of Spies by George Ella Lyon

In Juvenile Fiction by Author

  • Darby by Jonathan Scott Fuqua 
Literary Allusions
# The novel's main character Scout is extremely well-read for a first grader, which causes her teacher much 
 consternation.   She alludes to Mr. Jingle from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens during Mayella Ewell's
 testimony at the trial and Bulfinch's Mytthology.
# Jem, Scout & Dill act out stories from Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Rover Boys by Victor Appleton,
 Tom Swift books, and books by Oliver Optic.
# Jem reads Ivanhoe to Mrs. DuBose.
# Scout learns to write by copying passages from the Bible. And Calpurnia teaches her son Zeebo to read from
 Blackstone's Commentaries.
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