Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee - 1586 Words

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, was published in 1960 and is read by ninth graders all across the country because of its Pulitzer-Prize-winning writing. To Kill a Mockingbird parallels Harper Lee’s life in the sense that like the main character, her father was a lawyer and she had a best friend similar to the one of her main characters. She used this real life experience to tell the fictional story of Scout, a young girl living in the prejudiced community of Maycomb, Alabama. Scout and her brother, Jem, encounter a young boy, Dill, and quickly befriend him. They become interested in the suspicious story of Boo Radley and his family. However, the story’s plot is centered around her father, Atticus, and his case to defend Tom†¦show more content†¦On Scout’s first day of school, she quickly starts off on the wrong foot with her teacher, Miss Caroline, who scolds her for her bad reading habits. Meanwhile, Scout is annoyed that Miss Caroline, havi ng recently moved there, has not picked up on Maycomb’s ways yet because she tried to give a Cunningham a quarter and every Maycomb citizen knows that even though they are dirt poor, the Cunningham’s do not take anything from anyone. Scout arrives home from school and announces that she does not want to attend school ever again because of the day’s events. Atticus informs Scout that, â€Å"‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it’† (39). Atticus told her that by doing so, she will get along better with other people, including Miss Caroline. Atticus continues to explain that if Scout had put herself in Miss Caroline’s shoes, Scout would understand that Miss Caroline had simply not known any better than to give a Cunningham money, and she was only insisting that Scout not read at home so that she would not practice her bad reading hab its and allow her teachers to correct them. As a result, Atticus taught Scout an important lesson that bettered her as a person because it would allow her to interact with others more easily and with fewer disagreements. Scout demonstrates her newfound ability to understand people later in the book when