To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Philadelphia : J.B. Lippincott Company, 1960. Book club edition with Harper Lee photo. Hardcover. 255 pages ; 20 cm. In original dust jacket with firm binding, clean and unmarked pages.

"Someone rare has written this very fine first novel? a writer with the liveliest sense of life and the warmest, most authentic humor, A touching book; and so funny, so likable," —TRUMAN CAPOTE

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD BY HARPER LEE

At the age of eight, Scout Finch is an entrenched free-thinker. She can accept her father's warning that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, because mockingbirds harm no one and give great pleasure. The benefits said to be gained from going to school and keeping her temper elude her.

The place of this enchanting, intensely moving story is Maycomb, Alabama. The time is the Depression, but Scout and her brother, Jem, are seldom depressed. They have appalling gifts for entertaining themselves — appalling, that is, to almost everyone except their wise lawyer father, Atticus.

Atticus is a man of unfaltering good will and humor, and partly because of this, the children become involved in some disturbing adult mysteries: fascinating Boo Radley, who never leaves his house; the terrible temper of Mrs. Dubose down the street; the fine distinctions that make the Finch family "quality"; the forces that cause the people of Maycomb to show compassion in one crisis and unreasoning cruelty in another.

Also because Atticus is what he is, and because he lives where he does, he and his children are plunged into a conflict that indelibly marks their lives—and gives Scout some basis for thinking she knows just about as much about the world as she needs to.

"To Kill a Mockingbird is an authentic and nostalgic story which in rare fashion at once puts together the tenderness and the tragedy of the South. They are the inseparable ingredients of a region much reported but seldom so well understood." —JONATHAN DANIELS

HARPER LEE was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. She attended the local schools and studied law at the University of Alabama. For some years she spent most of her time in New York City where, until she began writing, she was employed in the reservations department of an international airline. "Aside from writing," says Miss Lee, "my chief interests in life are collecting memoirs of nineteenth-century clergymen, golf, crime and music."