While the texture of this story is far different than Red Harvest, it is moderately interesting that we randomly segued from a book written in the late 1920′s to a book set in the 1930′s. I am relieved to say that through chapter 10, the only serious use of a gun has been to put down a rabid dog.

You have mentioned in a Red Harvest comment that the opening sentence in TKaM is proleptic but I am going to claim that it is simply real-time and the remainder of the narrative, or most of it from page 5 on, is analeptic. I suppose this depends on your temporal point of view.

Epigraph: “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once”—Charles Lamb. A delightfully humorous statement by itself, particularly if one has come to know contentious lawyers.

From the “blurb” on the back: “Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, where she attended Huntingdon College and studied law at the University of Alabama.” Probing this at the Wikipedia page on Lee, one finds among other interesting things relevant to the book that Lee did not finish her law degree.

Scout, the narrator-as-adult-recalling-childhood-episode, “is” 9 years old, in 1935, when the book reaches its conclusion.

The immediately available paratexts collaborate with the text and point to a strong possibility that the work is heavily autobiographical. The autobiographical quality has been noted by others over the years though Lee has made efforts to play it down. Whether true or not, I believe this contributes in part to the affective powers of the work.

Among the interesting tidbits available on the Wikipedia site is a suggestion that the basis for the character Dill was Lee’s childhood friend and neighbor: Truman Capote. Now, no matter what I do/read to change it, Dill will have for me Philip Seymour Hoffman’s face and voice.