This is one of those books that stick with you forever. Even if you only read it once.
I don’t remember now what made me decide to read this book, but I do know I was in my early 30s when I finally bought a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird and read it for the first time.
There are stories within stories in this book … so many topics are covered. And the movie is just as good — I’ve seen it more than once.
Published in July 1960, the book wasn’t expected to sell more than a few thousand copies. Instead, over 500,000 copies were sold in the next 12 months. But since then, sales have reached over 40 million copies worldwide. (It has never been out of print.)
The book also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. Sixty years later, on December 28, 2021, The New York Times declared Lee’s book to be the “best book of the past 125 years.”
The author, Harper Lee, wrote the book as a semi-autobiographical tale about her early life. (Her character’s name in the book is Scout.) One event mentioned in the book was similar to one that actually happened in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama in 1936 — when Lee was 10.
In an interview published in 1998, Lee said the book “is not an autobiography, but rather an example of how an author ‘should write about what he knows and write truthfully.’ ”
I think one reason this book has become such an enduring classic is because it touches on so many universal truths: courage, compassion, human dignity, tragedy, and injustice. (There’s some humor in the book, too.)
One of the great phrases in the book was this statement by Atticus (Scout’s father — a lawyer who was always ready to defend the underdog): “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb around in his skin and walk around in it.”
If you’ve never read the book OR seen the movie (released in 1962, with Gregory Peck playing the part of Atticus), I encourage you to do both!
