# To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee's Pulitzer-winning 1960 novel, narrated by Scout Finch in Depression-era Alabama, centered on her father Atticus's defense of Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. The canonical American schoolroom treatment of racial injustice and moral courage — and, decades on, a text contested from two directions at once. ## Why It's in the KB Two live relevances. First, it is a **perennial book-ban target**: challenged historically by segregationists, today by both right-wing curriculum campaigns (racial discomfort statutes) and some progressive districts (white-savior framing, slurs in classroom use) — making it a recurring data point in the [[Erasing History]]-era education wars. Second, its reception history tracks the American argument about race itself: the gap between the novel's white-moderate heroism and the structural critique of later writers ([[James Baldwin]], whose *The Fire Next Time* the vault's [[The Fire This Time]] anthology answers) is itself instructive. ## Reading notes - Notion carried both ★★ and Favorite — preserved faithfully (a complicated relationship with a complicated book).