With endless books and infinitely more to be written in the future, it is rare occasion that I take the time to reread a novel. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.īook Review: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal.

It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.Ĭompassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee takes readers to the roots of human behavior – to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. The original manuscript of the novel was considered to have been lost until the autumn of 2014, when Tonja Carter discovered it in a secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird.Theme: Community and Convention, Female Sexuality and Friendship, Faith, Suffering, and God’s Will, Science and Superstition, Justice and Judgmentīook Summary: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand both her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.Īfter To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, Harper Lee set aside Go Set a Watchman, and never returned to it. Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father Atticus. Go Set a Watchman, released in 2015, is set during the mid-1950s and features many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird some twenty years later.

A benchmark of classic American literature, To Kill A Mockingbird approaches the highly sensitive topic of racism in 1930s America with humour, warmth and compassion, making it widely recognised as one of the best books of the twentieth century and in American literature.