To Kill A Mockingbird By: Harper Lee

The story starts with the narrator telling the audience about her family. The narrator is a young girl named “Jean Louise Finch” but every one calls her by her nick name “Scout”

Scout starts the story reminiscing about the time when her brother Jem broke his arm. “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow”(3).

The two siblings are having an argument about the events that led up to Jem breaking his arm.

Scout believes that the Ewell family started it all

Jem thinks that it started the summer their friend Dill came to visit. When Dill had the idea of making Boo Radley come out

Scout argues back that if he wanted to go back that far, he may as well say it started over 100 years ago when President Jackson forced the Creek Indians to move, clearing up land for their ancestor Simon Finch to come to Alabama

They decide to settle the argument by taking to their father, Atticus Finch. He says they are both right.

Here the chapter gives us a short time line of their family.

Simon Finch (their ancestor) leaves England because he is being religiously persecuted for being Methodist.

Simon came to Alabama and became a doctor. He made a lot of money doing this. He bought three slaves, and some land and founded Finch’s Landing- a cotton plantation. He married and had many daughters.

Simon died when he was very old, and very rich. It was tradition for the men of the family to stay on Finch’s Landing and make a living there growing cotton.

When the Civil War ended years later, the Finch family was left with nothing but the land.

Scout’s father Atticus is the first to break this tradition. He leaves the Landing and goes to school to become a lawyer. His younger brother, Jack, becomes a doctor. His sister Alexandra stays and takes care of the land with her husband.

Once Atticus gets his law degree, he moves to Maycomb, Alabama (about 20 miles east of Finch’s Landing).

Atticus practices law in a small office in Maycomb, and he payed for his brother Jack to go to Medical School.

“He liked Maycomb, he was Maycomb County born and bred; he knew his people, they knew him, and because of Simon Finch’s industry, Atticus was related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in the town”(5).

And this is where our story begins… Open your books to page 5