A Literary Analysis Of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird

1181 Words5 Pages
Cheuk Wai Fu (Justine)
Professor Katarzyna Wasylak
ENGL 169
13 November 2015
A Literary Analysis of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”
American writer Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has been a classic in the American literature for over half a decade. The story of a widowed lawyer, Atticus Finch and his children, Scout and Jem, living in Alabama, southern parts of the United States, has revealed one of the greatest social issues in the 1950s, the racial inequality and the segregation between black and white people. There were conflicts between the two groups and there were always prejudices towards the black people in the society. In the novel, it covers three years of Scout Finch’s childhood living in Maycomb Alabama during the Great Depression period while she is five to eight. Scout and his brother Jem love to go out of their house and play and they are fascinated by their neighbor’s house. One day, there is a black man named Tom Robinson arrested and he is accused by a young white woman for raping and attacking her. Atticus, Scout’s father, becomes his lawyer and defends for what Tom is charged for. Since then, Scout’s neighborhood’s attitudes towards their family changed and they treat the Finches differently. Other children in the town start to bully Scout and Jem. Although Tom Robinson did not rape nor attack the young woman, he is judged as guilty and is sent to prison. He is killed for his escape of prison. Throughout the story, Lee used the child’s