To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, one year after Harper Lee published it. Set in fictional Maycomb, Alabama, during the 1930s Depression, it tells the story of lawyer Atticus Finch defending a Black man falsely accused of rape, filtered through the eyes of his young daughter Scout. It topped a 2018 PBS 'Great American Read' survey of the novel that most changed readers' lives, and it holds a troubling parallel distinction: it is consistently among the most frequently challenged books in American school libraries, a measure of the power it still carries to disturb and transform.