Beginning of Essay
To Kill A Mockingbird is set against this background of 1930 Southern life. The Finches are a family who once had a large, successful plantation. Their ancestors had been aristocratic ladies and gentlemen of the South. Now they have been reduced to gentile poverty ....

Middle of Essay
.... homestead, Finch's Landing. The Civil War left the family only its land, which was the source of family incomes until the twentieth century when Atticus Finch (Scout's father) and his brother Jack left the land for careers in law and medicine. Atticus settled in Maycomb, the county seat of Maycomb County, with a reasonably successful law practice about twenty miles from Finch's Landing, where his sister Alexandra still lived. Scout describes Maycomb as a lethargic, hot, colorless, narrow-minded town where she lives with her father, brother Jem (four years older) and the family cook, Calpurnia. Scout's mother had died when she was two. When she w ....