Setting

Physical setting

The novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee takes place during the early 1930s in the town of Maycomb, Alabama. The novel spans a few years from when Scout is almost six years old to when she is nine. 

The town of Maycomb is a setting that allows the exploration of the racial discrimination in the United States’ deep south in the 1930s. It is described as an old and quiet town where not much happens: 

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. […] A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy, and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. (p. 6)

The town is home to a small community where pe...