Author: Haper Lee

Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics

Pub. in: March, 2002

ISBN: 0060935464

Pages: 336

Measurements: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches

Origin of product: USA

Order code: BA00427

Other information: 1st Perennial Classics edition

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Winner in 1960, translated into more than 40 languages, and sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.

"I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the jay birds you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird" - Atticus Finch

Set against the backdrop of the Depression, Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird traces 3 years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch in a country town of Maycomb, Alabama in southern Unite States of America as she and her elder brother Jem perceive through their young, quzzical eyes the irrational prejudice of the people against blacks and are unable to comprehend or accept the racial tension that's readily staring at the reader from virtually every page of this entertaining classic.

To Kill A Mockingbird is the saga of Atticus, the father of Jem and Scout,a widower and lawyer,the hero of the piece, and his eternal fight for justice for a black man charged with the rape of a nineteen-year-old white girl. Tom Robinson is the real mockingbird of the story; wronged, hapless, hopeless and circustancially crippled negro chased by the intellectually limited white hunters. Atticus is the odd man out and is severely chastened for despite being a white, he defends an ignominable white. He's called "a nugger-lover" and his children are consistently hackled at school as well as by Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose, a sinister, cynical woman who subsides to death due to morphine addiction.

To Kill A Mockingbird is indeed a social tragedy but the plot of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning novel consorts other fragmented dark pieces of the jigsaw puzzle and the final picture is a ghastly one framed in a social contour of deep hypocrisy and abusive racial segregation. The agony of Tom Robinson when he undergoes a clinical segmentation of his alrady distorted character during his trial as the rapist of Mayella Violet Ewell symbolises the eternal blasphemised black community's urge to fabricate itself into the social realm. Little Scout - the narrator of the novel - and Jem are confounded by the town's conscience and find the deep-rooted prejudice and hypocritic mind-set of the people a tough feature to digest. These "inquisitive children" endure a complex relationship with their father and their innocence and bemused exclamatory remarks lends a superaded charm to the mesh of events. "Jem, I ain't ever heard of a nigger snowman", Scout asks her developing broter once and on another occasion lays bare the stark double-standard sustained by the people:"Jem, how can you hate Hitler so an' then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home -?" Boo Radley's queeness of locking himself up in his house for good transfigures from a mere item of comic relief both to the reader and to Jem, Scout and their friend Dill to a suden realisation of truth that he does so "because he wants to" escape from the bitter cold gale of base racism outside.

Written in first-person narrative through the confused but unrelenting hand of Scout Finch, Harper Lee's scheme of ideas aptly ekes out the social scars and humanity's vices. A sly humor underlines the multi- dimensional perspectives of the town, a small area chunked out of the large human landscape and portraying life as it is. Witty ironies and direct sarcasms as in the issue of First Purchase M.E. Church being worshipped by negroes on Sundays and "white men gambl (-ing) on it on weekays" underline a much deeper insight into the Western society. The unscrupulous running away of Tom Robinson from the crime-scene, the subsequent alegation of rape against him, the stripping off of the illusion that the sheriff of the Macomb county Mr.Heck Tate bore against the the alleged criminal, colored cok Calpurnia's blendind of dual lives of a white and a black, Jem and Scout's comprehension of the Cunningham's true identity, the mistaken judgement of the jury, Mr. Link Deas's sympathy towards Tom's wife Helen, and the architect of the doom of the negro as wel asthat of the novel Mr. Bob Ewell's poetically just demise all conform to the interfusion of the light and dark shades of life.

To Kill A Mockingbird is not even 50 years old and already it has been acclaimed as a classic, an enthralling explicit book which aims to elucidate the biasness of the society towards the minor fractions. Even in this 21st century, racism, racial tensions and racial abuse are still loitering around in all nooks and corners of the world and Harpe Lee's massively successful book exposes the violence and meanness that lurks underneath the nobleman's surface. Attiucus advises his children:"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird". And this sin is being shouldered and would be loaded on the posterity of all generations. Scout and Jem would now be old and still retain their armour of innocence but others, who're diabolically more abundant in nature, such as Mrs. Dubose, Mr. Ewell and Miss Gates, never expound themselves out of their self-made cocoons and consequently never grow. The relevance of this superbly conceived classic in our age is hollering at us from virtually every oppressed man's cries and the need for the Atticuses, Jemes, Scoutes and Deases couldn't arrive at a more appropriate time.

Harper Lee's only novel won the hearts of millions of readers around the world, selling many million copies and being translated into forty languages. Critics loved it for the powerful messages that it sent to the world, as well as being a great work of literature in its own right. Harper Lee uses her unique compassionate style of telling a tender story. The book won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1960, one year after it was published. The following year it was made into a major Hollywood film starring Gregory Pack in his Academy Award-winning role as Atticus Finch.

We highly recommend To Kill A Mockingbird and will relentlessly promote it to the Chinese readers through our marketing efforts as one of the finest American novels ever written, a timeless classic of conscience and humanity.

Target readers: General readers

Better with Animal Farm :

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