Harper Lee's only novel for most of her life, and it won the 1961 Pulitzer and never left the American classroom. Scout Finch narrates a Depression-era Alabama childhood broken open by her father Atticus's doomed defense of a Black man falsely accused of rape. It taught two generations what moral courage looks like at a child's eye level — and it has been challenged and pulled from shelves almost continuously for the same scenes that make it matter. The sentimental reading is the easy one; the harder book underneath is about how a town keeps its decency and its cruelty in the same people.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.