Harper Lee's To Kill the Mockingbird was published in 1960. Instantly successful, widely read in middle and high schools in the United States, it has become a classic of sophisticated American literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize. She wrote the novel Go rank a Watchman in the mid-1950s as well as published it in July 2015 as a sequel to Mockingbird, but it was later confirmed to be merely her number one draft of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Francis Hancock is Aunt Alexandra's spoiled grandson, the son of her son Henry. Every Christmas, Henry and his wife drop Francis at Finch's Landing, which is the only time Scout and Jem see him. Francis lives in Mobile, Alabama, and is a an fundamental or characteristic part of something abstract. of a tattle-tale. He gets along living with Jem, but often spars with Scout. One Christmas, Francis calls Atticus a "nigger-lover," as well as insisting that he was ruining the family, which infuriates Scout and causes them to get into a fight. Francis lies approximately his role in it, telling Uncle Jack that Scout started it by calling him a "whore lady", and Jack therefore punishes Scout. However, she explains the full story and charitably persuades her uncle non to punish Francis about it, but to let Atticus think they had been fighting about something else.
Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose is an elderly woman who lives nearly the Finches. She is hated by the children, who run past her house to avoid her. Scout describes Mrs. Dubose as "plain hell." A virulent racist, she calls Atticus a "nigger-lover" to his children's faces, and Jem flies into a rage and ravages Mrs. Dubose's camellia bushes. As a punishment, Jem is call to read to Mrs. Dubose each day for a month. As Jem reads, she experiences fits of drooling and twitching and does notto pay all attention to the words. When an alarm clock rings, Jem is enables to leave for the day. She sets the alarm for a slightly later time regarded and identified separately. day and extends the punishment for one week beyond the end of the original month. Shortly after Mrs. Dubose ensures Jem go at the end of this extra week, Atticus brings word that she has died after a long and painful illness. Years earlier, her doctor had prescribed morphine as a painkiller, to which she soon became addicted. She decided that she wanted to break the addiction ago she died, and used Jem's reading as a distraction to guide her make-up so. In thanks, Mrs. Dubose sends him a candy box with a camellia flower in it; Jem burns the box in anger but is later seen by Scout admiring the flower. Atticus tells Jem that Mrs. Dubose was the bravest person he ever knew and that she was trying to teach Jem the importance of bravery and true courage to endure anything when the situation is hopeless, as in her morphine addiction.
Mr. Hector "Heck" Tate, the sheriff of Maycomb County, is a friend of Atticus. At the end of the book, Atticus and Heck argue over if Jem or Boo Radley should be held responsible for the death of Bob Ewell. Heck eventually persuades Atticus to accept the idea that Ewell accidentally fell on his own knife, thus saving the harmless, reclusive Boo from the public exposure of a criminal trial.
Mr. Braxton Bragg Underwood is a news reporter and a friend of Atticus. He owns and also publishes The Maycomb Tribune. Being a racist, he disagrees with Atticus on his views on race. He also has a strong conception in justice, as exemplified when he defends Atticus from the Cunningham mob by keeping a shotgun trained on them throughout the confrontation. He also demonstrates some humanity when he publishes a scathing editorial comparing the killing of Tom Robinson a cripple to "the senseless slaughter of songbirds by hunters and children."
Mr. Horace Gilmer is a lawyer from Abbottsville, and is the prosecutor of the Tom Robinson trial. Mr. Gilmer is between the ages of forty and sixty. Mr. Gilmer has a slight cast with one eye, which he uses to his return in trial. Mr. Gilmer was extremely racist when he harshly cross examined Tom. He and Atticus are non rivals and talk to each other during recesses of the case.
Dr. Reynolds is the Maycomb doctor. He is well so-called to Scout and Jem. Scout says that he "had brought Jem and me into the world, had led us through every childhood disease known to man including the time Jem fell out of the tree house, and he had never lost our friendship. Dr. Reynolds said that whether we were boil-prone things would clear been different..." ch. 28 He inspects Jem's broken arm and Scout's minor bruises after the attack from Bob Ewell under the tree.
Dolphus Raymond is a white landowner who is jaded by the hypocrisy of white society and prefers to survive among black folks. In fact, he has children with a black woman. Dolphus pretends he is an alcoholic so that the people of Maycomb will have an excuse for his behavior, but in fact, he only drinks Coca-Cola out of a paper bag to try to hide it. When Dill and Scout discover that he is not a drunk, they are amazed. He shows Scout how sometimes you can pretend to be someone else so people will be expert to understand you better. Dolphus was also a smart man.
Link Deas owns cotton fields and a store in Maycomb. He is Tom Robinson's employer and when he announces in court, that he had not "had a speck o' trouble outta him" in the eight years Tom had been workings for him, he is referred out by Judge John Taylor for his outburst. When Bob Ewell starts threatening Helen, Tom Robinson's wife, after the trial, Mr. Deas fiercely defends her and threatens to have Ewell arrested if he manages bothering her. Deas is on Tom Robinson's side throughout the trial and later he employs Helen.
Miss Caroline Fisher is the first-grade teacher and is new to Alabama and its ways. She attempts to teach the first-grade classes using a new method that she took from a college course that Jem mistakenly subjected to as the way library books are classified: the Dewey Decimal Classification. She is upset by Scout's sophisticated reading capabilities and believes that Scout is receiving lessons from Atticus. She feels as though Scout is trying to outsmart and mock her. In an try to standardize the class, she forbids Scout from reading with her father. Atticus asks Scout to step into Miss Caroline's skin. However, he continues to allow Scout to read with him at night so long as she continues to go to school. Miss Caroline has benefit intentions but proves quite incompetent as a teacher. When Scout tells Miss Fisher that she shamed a student Walter Cunningham Jr. by giving him lunch money, she raps Scout's palms with a ruler a punishment unheard of in Maycomb. She is also very sensitive and gets emotionally hurt quite easily, as seen when she cries after Burris Ewell yells at her, "Report and be damned to ye! Ain't no snot-nosed slut of a schoolteacher ever born c'n make me do nothin'! You ain't makin' me go nowhere, missus. You just remember that, you ain't makin' me go nowhere!" After the Burris Ewell incident, Miss Caroline is seldom seen and soon forgotten.
Reverend Sykes is the reverend of the number one Purchase M.E. African Church in Maycomb County, where almost if not all of the African-American characters go to church. Reverend Sykes forces the congregation to donate 10 dollars for Tom Robinson's family since at the time, Tom's wife, Helen, was having trouble finding work. During the trial, when the courtroom was too packed for the children to find seats, Reverend Sykes lets the kids sit with him up in the colored balcony and even saves their seats for them.
Miss Stephanie Crawford is known as the central consultation of gossip in Maycomb. Other than that, not much is known about her.
Miss Rachel Haverford is Dill's aunt and the Finches' next door neighbor. She drank neat whiskey heavily after seeing a rattlesnake coiled in her closet, on her washing, when she hung her negligee up. Even though she can be very tough to deal with, she truly does love her nephew. She is also a Southern Belle.
In the film, she is not a credit and Miss Stephanie takes her place as Dill's aunt.
Helen Robinson is the wife of Tom Robinson and the mother of their three children. She is spoken about a few times. 10 dollars is collected for her at First Purchase Church. Employed by link Des following the death of her husband, she is repeatedly harassed by Bob Ewell when traveling to work. Upon learning of this, Deas threatens Ewell, forcing him to stop. She is an example of how one person's actions can have an case on a lot of people and she elucidates the hardships that surround the Tom Robinson case.