TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD :
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American author
Harper Lee. It was published in July 1960 and became instantly successful. In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill a Mockingbird has become a classic of modern American literature; a year after its release, it won the Pulitzer Prize. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee’s observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.Read More
PART ONE
1
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly
broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being
able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about
his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he
stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body,
his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as
he could pass and punt.
When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them,
we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain
that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior,
said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came
to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.
I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began
with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn’t run the Creeks up the
creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and
where would we be if he hadn’t? We were far too old to settle an
argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we
were both right.
Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of
the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the
Battle of Hastings. All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping
apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his
stinginess. In England, Simon was irritated by the persecution of those
who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more liberal
brethren, and as Simon called himself a Methodist, he worked his way
across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to
Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens. Mindful of John Wesley’s strictures
on the use of many words in buying and selling, Simon made a pile
practicing medicine, but in this pursuit he was unhappy lest he be
tempted into doing what he knew was not for the glory of God, as the
putting on of gold and costly apparel. So Simon, having forgotten his
teacher’s dictum on the possession of human chattels, bought three
slaves and with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the
Alabama River some forty miles above Saint Stephens. He returned to
Saint Stephens only once, to find a wife, and with her established a line
that ran high to daughters. Simon lived to an impressive age and died
rich.
It was customary for the men in the family to remain on Simon’s
homestead, Finch’s Landing, and make their living from cotton. The
place was self-sufficient: modest in comparison with the empires
around it, the Landing nevertheless produced everything required to
sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clothing, supplied by
river-boats from Mobile.
Simon would have regarded with impotent fury the disturbance
between the North and the South, as it left his descendants stripped of
everything but their land, yet the tradition of living on the land
remained unbroken until well into the twentieth century, when my
father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery to read law, and his younger
brother went to Boston to study medicine. Their sister Alexandra was
the Finch who remained at the Landing: she married a taciturn man
who spent most of his time lying in a hammock by the river wondering
if his trot-lines were full.Read More>>
Full Novel is Available On :
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