In the small town of Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s, six-year-old Scout Finch and her older brother Jem become the beneficiaries of gifts left by an anonymous giver who deposits them in the hollowed tree outside the Radley house. While Scout and Jem ponder the identity of their generous secret sharer and his relationship to the reclusive Radley family, their lawyer father, Atticus, is appointed defense attorney for Tom Robinson, a young black man accused of raping a white woman in a case that has brought the town's simmering racial tensions to a boil. Slowly, ineluctably, the worlds of innocence and experience known to the members of the Finch family come into violent collision, shaking their beliefs in the inevitability of justice and the ultimate triumph of truth over hypocrisy and prejudice. A modern American classic that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and served as the basis for the Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.