To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee’s only novel for most of her life won the Pulitzer Prize and became a fixture of American classrooms. Narrated by young Scout Finch in Depression-era Alabama, it follows her father Atticus as he defends a Black man falsely accused of rape, and turns a child’s-eye view into a lasting study of conscience, prejudice, and moral courage. Taylor Swift has said the book changed the way she looked at life, crediting it among the reads that shaped her as a storyteller.