How To Kill A Mockingbird Fit Into Society

How would you feel if the way you chose to live your life was constantly being analyzed by society? Harper Lee is best known for her best-selling book To Kill A Mockingbird. She bases the book off of a black man named Tom Robinson, who has been accused of raping Mayella Ewell. She got the inspiration for the novel when a similar trial, The Scottsboro Trial, broke out in Alabama in 1931. In To Kill A Mockingbird, Tom is falsely proved guilty and later shot while in jail. Maycomb County, the county jail that Tom was placed in, was not happy when they heard that one of their own white citizens, Atticus Finch, was representing a black man in court. Atticus Finch is the man that took on this trial knowing what would come of it. His children, Jem

The Ewells don’t fit into society because they don’t have the luxuries that other Maycomb citizens do. “Atticus says the Ewells had been the disgrace of Maycomb for three generations. None of them had done an honest day’s work in his recollection” (Lee 40). Scout recalls the time that her father was talking about the Ewell family and how they are poor, but yet they don’t do anything to try and fix that. Nobody in the county associates themselves with the Ewells because they don’t live or act the way that others do. “Maycomb’s Ewells lived behind the town garbage dump” (227). The family is not wealthy enough to afford to live in a normal home, so they have to live in an old, rustic cabin. “In certain circumstances the common folk judiciously allowed them certain privileges by the simple method of becoming blind to some of the Ewells’ activities. They didn’t have to go to school, for one thing. Another thing, Mr.Bob Ewell was permitted to hunt and trap out of season” (41). The Ewells aren’t the only family to be looked at as outcasts in Maycomb society. It seems that the Radley family and them share the common interest of not wanting to conform to society’s