To Kill a Mockingbird

Why it’s on the list: Harper Lee’s novel of two summers in Depression-era Alabama, narrated by Scout Finch: a children’s obsession with the shut-in next door, and her father’s defence of a Black man accused of raping a white woman. Atticus wins the argument and loses the verdict, and the book’s durability rests on its refusal to pretend otherwise.

Where I heard about it

• Founders Classical Academy — on the eighth-grade list at the Lewisville, Texas school, posted by the Classic Learning Test in September 2026 as an example of what a classical curriculum assigns. It is the one twentieth-century American novel in that year, read alongside Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Douglass — three American books about the same wound, a century apart. Full sequence: Founders Classical Academy Reading List.

About this edition

Published 1960; Pulitzer Prize the following year.

Connections

• Founders Classical Academy Reading List — the curriculum this came from; 56 unique titles across 5th through 12th grade.
• Classical Education — the movement whose canon this list is.
• Harper Lee
• Literature