To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee :: To Kill a Mockingbird Essays

To Kill a Mockingbird by Horton Foote To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel set over sixty years ago in a foreign country, yet it has always been both popular and respected. Consider why the novel is still relevant to readers in 2015. Refer closely to events and characters in the text. ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ shows that even in the democratic society of the United States, there was discrimination and prejudice in the nineteen-thirties. Although this has been reduced there, in many other countries and regions these conditions still exist for minority groups. Consequently people from a different culture or those who live their lives differently from the majority are still looked down upon and regarded as outsiders. An example of this in the story is the Radley family who live in Maycomb. They have isolated themselves from the community by living strictly within the rules established by the father. The youngest son, Arthur ‘Boo’ Radley is locked up in his house after committing a small crime with his friends, and is blamed for nearly every small offence in Maycomb even if he had not committed anything, â€Å" any stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work.† In the court case later on in the book, Mayella Ewell, a young white woman, falsely accuses Tom Robinson, a ‘Negro’ of raping her. Tom Robinson is a married white man with three children and a respected member of the black church-going community. There was no circumstantial evidence to prove that he committed any crime. Despite this, the jury, consisting solely of white men, find him guilty, demonstrating their unreasonable bias against black people. Nowadays this is still occurring in many countries, and the story makes us more aware of how easily such racial intolerance can lead to totally false judgements. As Scout starts school, her teacher immediately dislikes her when she discovers that Scout was literate, and the author tells us â€Å" she looked at me with more than faint distaste.† Her teacher also disliked her because she spoke on behalf of Walter Cunningham, who would not