Register Login
Toggle navigation
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird Brief Summary
Summary
SHMOOP PREMIUM
MENU
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD SUMMARY
BACK NEXT
To Kill a Mockingbird en Español
How It All Goes Down
The place: Maycomb, Alabama, finalist for Most Boring Town in America. Few people move in, fewer move out, so it's just the same families doing the same things for generation after generation. Like the Finches: Scout, her brother Jem, and their father Atticus. Every summer Scout and Jem are joined by Dill Harris, who shares their obsession with the local haunted house, the Radley Place, and the boogeyman who lives there, Boo Radley.
Fall comes, Dill leaves, and Scout starts school. The Radley Place is in between Scout's house and school, so she has to go by it every day, usually at top speed. One day she notices something odd: a couple of pieces of gum stuck in a hole in the tree. She tells Jem about it, and soon they find other treasures hidden in the same place, including finely-carved soap figurines of Scout and Jem themselves. This lasts until the following fall, when they find that Mr. Nathan (Boo's brother) has filled in the knothole with cement.
That winter, disaster strikes: Miss Maudie's house catches on fire and burns to the ground. While a sleepy Scout stands on the street trying not to freeze, someone drapes a blanket over her shoulders without her noticing: turns out that someone was Boo Radley, and it freaks Scout out that he was right there and she didn't even notice.
At school, Scout gets flak from her classmates because her father, a lawyer, has taken on a new client, a black man named Tom Robinson. Over the summer, Jem and Scout learn important lessons about race (black people don't much like white people; their black cook has a whole life and world of her own), and they also learn that Tom Robinson's been accused of raping a white woman. Oh, and meanwhile Aunt Alexandra...