To Kill a Mockingbird recap

In Depression-era Maycomb, Alabama, young Scout Finch, her brother Jem, and their friend Dill spend their summers fascinated by Boo Radley, a recluse rumored to haunt the house down the street. Their father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, is appointed to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell. At the trial Atticus proves Tom could not have done it and exposes Mayella's father, Bob Ewell, as the likely abuser, but the prejudiced jury convicts Tom anyway, and he is later shot trying to escape prison. Humiliated, Bob Ewell seeks revenge and attacks Scout and Jem on Halloween night, breaking Jem's arm. Boo Radley emerges from his house to save the children, killing Ewell in the struggle. The sheriff quietly covers it up to protect Boo, and Scout, walking her rescuer home, at last sees the value of understanding others from their own point of view.

Scout Finch, her older brother Jem, and their father Atticus, a lawyer, live in the sleepy town of Maycomb, Alabama. During the summers the children befriend a visiting boy named Dill, and the three become obsessed with the Radley house down the street and the man rumored to live shut inside it, Boo Radley. They invent games about him and dare one another to approach the house, half-terrified and half-hoping to lure him out. Scout begins school and chafes against its rules, guided at home by the family's Black cook, Calpurnia. Small gifts begin turning up in the knothole of a tree by the Radley property, hinting that someone there is quietly watching over the children even as they creep around his yard by night.

The children's fixation on the Radley place continues. One night raid ends with Jem losing his trousers on the fence, and he later finds them mended and folded where he left them. The knothole gifts stop when Boo's brother fills the hole with cement. That winter Miss Maudie's house burns down, and as Scout watches the fire, an unseen hand drapes a blanket over her shoulders. Atticus agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of raping a white woman, and the children face taunts over it. Atticus surprises them by shooting a rabid dog dead in the street. When Jem, stung by an insult, destroys the flowers of the sick and bitter Mrs. Dubose, he is made to read aloud to her each day; after she dies, Atticus explains she was a morphine addict who chose to conquer her habit before death, a truer kind of courage than a gun.

Calpurnia takes Scout and Jem to her church, giving them a glimpse of Maycomb's Black community. Atticus's sister, Aunt Alexandra, comes to live with the family, determined to make a lady of Scout. As the trial nears, Dill runs away from home and is found hiding under Scout's bed. The night before proceedings begin, Atticus keeps watch outside the jail where Tom Robinson is held, and a mob arrives meaning to harm the prisoner. Scout, Jem, and Dill turn up, and Scout's innocent, friendly talk to one of the men shames the crowd into leaving. The next day nearly the whole town gathers for the trial, and the children slip into the courthouse balcony to watch it unfold.

At the trial, Bob Ewell and his daughter Mayella testify that Tom Robinson beat and assaulted her. Through careful questioning, Atticus shows that Mayella's injuries were mainly on the right side of her face, the work of a left-handed man, and that Bob Ewell is left-handed while Tom's left arm was crippled long ago and hangs useless. Tom testifies that Mayella herself invited his attention and that her father caught them, implying she was beaten by Bob rather than harmed by Tom. Despite a strong defense and almost no real evidence, the all-white jury finds Tom guilty. Jem is stunned by the verdict, unable to accept so plain an injustice, while Atticus holds onto the hope of winning on appeal.

The guilty verdict settles heavily over the household. Atticus prepares an appeal, but word soon comes that Tom Robinson, in despair, tried to run from the prison yard and was shot dead. The town largely moves on, though Bob Ewell, humiliated by how Atticus handled the case, nurses his grudge and makes threats against those tied to the trial. Ordinary life resumes: Aunt Alexandra hosts her missionary circle, and Scout sits through a school lesson condemning tyranny abroad that sits uneasily beside the injustice she has just watched at home. Beneath the calm, Bob Ewell's bitterness has not faded.

On Halloween night, Scout and Jem walk home in the dark from a school pageant, Scout still in a bulky ham costume that limits her sight. Bob Ewell ambushes them, and in the struggle Jem's arm is broken. A stranger fights off Ewell, then carries the injured Jem home, and in the light Scout realizes their rescuer is Boo Radley, the reclusive neighbor they had feared for years. Bob Ewell is found dead, stabbed during the attack. Sheriff Heck Tate refuses to expose the shy Boo to public attention and rules that Ewell fell on his own knife, and Atticus lets the matter rest there. Scout walks Boo home and, standing on his porch, sees her street as he must have seen it all along. She finally grasps her father's lesson about looking at the world through another person's eyes.

Tom Robinson is convicted despite Atticus's clear proof of his innocence, and he is shot dead while attempting to escape from prison, a casualty of the town's racism. Bob Ewell, though he technically won the case, feels shamed by Atticus's exposure of him in court and vows revenge. On Halloween night he attacks Scout and Jem as they walk home from a school pageant, breaking Jem's arm. Boo Radley, the reclusive neighbor the children had long feared and mythologized, comes out of his house and saves them, killing Ewell with a kitchen knife in the fight. Sheriff Heck Tate, unwilling to drag the intensely private Boo into a public trial and grateful for what he did, insists that Bob Ewell fell on his own knife, and Atticus accepts it. Scout meets Boo at last, walks him back to his house, and stands on his porch imagining the years he watched the neighborhood and quietly looked after them. She goes home understanding, as Atticus taught her, that you never really know a person until you consider things from their point of view. Jem's arm heals, and the family endures, changed by what it has witnessed.