1960 Within a year of coming out, the novel had been translated into ten languages. A year later it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Then came the Oscar-winning movie. The story has never gone out of print. In all, it has sold over 30 million copies. Dozens of literary list-makers have voted it the best novel of the 20th century, and it’s a staple of school curricula around the world. In 2007 President George W. Bush awarded its author, Harper Lee (who had written nothing further of consequence), the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
So To Kill a Mockingbird was – is – as much a monument as it is a book. Why? To what? Set in a small Alabama town in mid-Depression, the story is built around the imaginative adventures of the tomboy Scout Finch, her older brother Jem, and their friend Dill Harris, who stays with his auntie during the summer. Atticus, the Finch children’s father, is a stern but kindly lawyer, whose conscientious decision to defend a young black man unjustly accused of rape turns the townspeople against the family, shattering the children’s innocence.
The book has been classified as southern gothic – wrongly, since much of its apparent grotesquery is based on actual characters and events. Truman Capote, Lee’s childhood friend and the model for Dill, remembered the original of the mysterious Boo Radley, who lives in a boarded-up house and leaves little gifts for the children in the knothole of a tree.
Stylistically, in other words, the narrative is much closer to realism than fantasy, told in the first person through the medium of an adult vocabulary, yet maintaining the strategic naivety of the child’s vantage point – more What Maisie Knew (1897) than The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940). Thematically To Kill a Mockingbird is an open book, because Atticus preaches the lesson explicitly to his children, and enacts it in the courtroom. It is the importance of sympathy, of imagining yourself inside another’s predicament.
This relative lucidity of both style and theme must have something to do with the book’s popularity. So must its timing – the moment of the book’s appearance, that is, not its setting. From the mid-fifties, with the Supreme Court decision against segregation in southern schools, Brown vs. the Board of Education, and the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, to the early sixties with its freedom rides and voter registration, the civil rights movement was gathering momentum.
Then there’s the trial. Although (or maybe because) only 5 per cent of criminal cases are heard before a jury, Americans love courtroom drama, because it gives them back the pure image of the country’s founding ideals. ‘Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal’, Atticus tells the jury in his summing-up. Maybe not born with equal opportunities, or equal in wealth or talent, he allows. ‘But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal. … In this country the courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.’
The American Film Institute ranked the movie number one on their list of courtroom dramas, and Atticus Finch, as played by Gregory Peck, the top screen hero of the past 100 years. Even the Monroe County courtroom has achieved iconic status. Though never used in the film, it was minutely copied and reproduced on a Hollywood sound stage. Now the original building is a museum – devoted to the book, the movie, to Harper Lee and the historical people behind her fictional characters.