To Kill a Mockingbird … is the complete antithesis of [Leon Odell Griffiths's] Seed in the Wind. Instead of stereotyped Negroes, this novel presents living, convincing characters—neither saints nor devils, neither completely ignorant or craven or foolish, nor completely wise or wholly courageous. Instead of blatant propaganda from beginning to end, the socially significant overtones do not begin to appear until the story has progressed a third of the way and then they creep in unobtrusively, as natural as breathing….
The story is told by Jean Louise Finch …, aged six at the beginning and eight at the end. It is dominated by [her] complete love and devotion for her father and older brother, her admiration for a boy her own age, her acceptance of Negroes as fellow human beings with the same rights and privileges as those of white people, and her hatred of all hypocrisy and cant. Her dramatic recital of the joys, fears, dreams, misdemeanors, and problems of her little circle of friends and enemies gives the most vivid, realistic, and delightful experiences of a child's world ever presented by an American novelist, with the possible exception of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. (p. 122)
Nick Aaron Ford, in PHYLON: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture (copyright, 1961, by Atlanta University; reprinted by permission of PHYLON), Vol. XXII, Second Quarter (June), 1961.
