This Web site will explore Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in a new and perhaps somewhat unusual light. I argue that Atticus Finch is not a paragon of virtue, as many have made him out to be, but rather a deeply flawed politician who is very much part of the system of racial oppression in Alabama, even though he happens to be defending Tom Robinson against charges of rape.

I will also be discussing the historical context of Harper Lee’s novel, which was published in 1960, in the nascent stages of the American civil rights movement that would eventually transform our country.