To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee :: To Kill a Mockingbird Essays

A summary: When Scout was six, Dill (Charles Baker Harris) comes to visit his aunt and becomes good friends with the Finches. The children in Maycomb spend all their free time of summer trying to get Boo (Arthur) Radley come out of his house. None of the children have ever seen the mysterious man that lives next door, but they never find out that he is actually shut up in this house. After the summer is over, Scout enters school and gets into trouble because she already knows how to read and to write. She is always constantly getting into fights with boys like Walter Cunningham, the son of a poor farmer. During that year, Scout and her older brother Jem begin to find things in a hole in a tree on the Radley property as they pass it going to and from school. The next summer, Dill returns and the three continue their plans to make Boo Radley emerge from his house. They try to use a fishing pole to stick a note onto one of the windows of the Radleys. One night they decided to sneak up t o one of the windows to have a peek inside. Jem reaches the porch when a shadow appears and the three of them run for their lives just as a shotgun blast is heard. Jem gets caught on the fence by his pants so he has to slip out of them in order to escape. Later he tries to go get the pants that he lost and is afraid. A little bit later Scout hears that the pants were mended very strangely and lying on the fence. The next fall, the children make their first snowman. During this cold spell, Miss Maudie's house burns down and Scout and Jem have to stand outside for fear that their house might also burn down. While they are shivering in the cold, someone wraps a blanket around scout without their knowing it. All indications point to Boo Radley putting the blanket around her. About this time, the children begin to hear in the town that their father is a "nigger- lover." Atticus warns his children never to fight about this, but at Christmas time when one of Scout's cousins makes the same statement, she bloodies his nose. That Christmas, both children receive air rifles but they are given instructions that they must never kill a