Publication of To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American writer Harper Lee, set in the 1930s in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama. The story is told through the eyes of a young girl, Scout Finch, whose father Atticus, a lawyer, defends a Black man, Tom Robinson, falsely accused of raping a white woman. The book deals with racism, injustice and moral courage in the American South, and it was an immediate success. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and was made into a film in 1962 with Gregory Peck as Atticus. It is widely read in schools, though it has also been criticized and challenged in some places.

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