To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, published in 1960, takes place in Maycomb, a little town in Alabama, in the American South, in the early 1930s, in the middle of the Great Depression. Everybody knows everybody, poverty is everywhere and social rules weigh heavily: who belongs to which family, who goes to which church, who stays on which side of the racial line.

Segregation is both law and custom: Black and white people go to school, pray and live in separate spaces, and the justice system tends to favor whites. In this setting, typical of Southerners of the time, the book shows the life of a family and a community.

The story is told by Scout, a six-year-old girl at the start, looking back as a grown woman. That perspective makes the world appear with a child's curiosity and frankness, which makes everything cut deeper: she asks what the adults have already learned to keep quiet about.

Scout lives with her brother, Jem, four years older, and with her father, Atticus Finch, a widower and lawyer. Her mother died when she was very small. The one who helps raise the two kids is Calpurnia, the family's Black cook, who demands obedience and teaches good manners without making any concessions. Every summer Dill arrives, a boy from another town who spends his vacation at his aunt's house next door, and he becomes the third member of the group.

The trio invents games, makes bets and spends their days between the street and the yard. One of their obsessions is trying to catch a glimpse of the mysterious figure inside the Radley house, just a few yards away. Neighborhood life, with its gossip and neighbors who know everything, feels like any small-town street.

The kids understand the world only through what they hear, and since they hear all kinds of things, they gradually sort out what makes sense from what doesn't. That is how the book slowly reveals the contradictions of the adult world.

The Radleys live in a gloomy house with shuttered windows, where Boo lives, a reclusive man who hasn't gone out in years. The rumors say everything: that he's dangerous, that he eats raw animals, that he attacks anyone who gets close. The kids feed the legend and turn the subject into a game, somewhere between fear and fascination.

Little by little, small gifts begin to appear in the hollow of a tree in the Radley yard: chewing gum, old coins, little figures carved from soap, a broken watch. Someone is trying to communicate. When the hollow is plugged with cement, the kids realize they have lost that neighbor's only channel of affection.

On another night, someone drapes a blanket over Scout's shoulders without her noticing. The lesson, which the end of the book will deliver in full, is that the monster of the rumors was a shy and caring person, and that collective imagination sometimes creates villains where there is only loneliness.