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49 free To Kill a Mockingbird trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This To Kill a Mockingbird trivia quiz covers Harper Lee's 1960 novel from the first summer with Dill to Scout standing on the Radley porch. It asks about the people of Maycomb (Atticus, Calpurnia, Miss Maudie, Mrs. Dubose, the Ewells and the Cunninghams), the mad dog, the knothole gifts, the lynch mob Scout talks down, the trial of Tom Robinson and the Halloween night that ends the book. It also asks where the mockingbird of the title comes in. Beyond the pages it covers what fed the story: Lee's father the lawyer, her childhood neighbour Truman Capote, the Walter Lett case her father's newspaper reported, the editor who turned Go Set a Watchman into the book we know, the Pulitzer, the bans and the 2015 release of that early draft. The 1962 film gets its share too, from Gregory Peck's Oscar to Robert Duvall's silent debut. Roughly a third of the questions are easy for anyone who read it in school, a third need a careful reader's memory, and the rest reward people who know their Lippincott from their Lamb. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the novel, its author and its adaptations before publishing, and each question carries the sentence that establishes it. If you think one is wrong, use the report button and we will look again.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year was To Kill a Mockingbird first published?
1960
To Kill a Mockingbird was first published by J. B. Lippincott on 11 July 1960, when Harper Lee was 34; it became an immediate bestseller.
Q 02What is the name of the fictional Alabama town where the novel is set?
Maycomb
Maycomb, the seat of Maycomb County, is the novel's fictional Alabama town, a 'tired old town' of the Depression; the story runs across three years, 1933 to 1935.
Q 03What is the narrator Scout's real first name?
Jean Louise
Scout's real name is Jean Louise Finch; she is nearly six when the book opens and narrates the story as an adult looking back on her childhood.
Q 04Which member of the Finch household is a Black cook who has helped raise the children for years?
Calpurnia
Calpurnia is the Finches' Black cook and a mother figure to the children; she scolds Scout for mocking Walter Cunningham's table manners, and the children's father backs her.
Q 05What is the nickname of Charles Baker Harris, the boy who visits each summer?
Dill
Dill is the nickname of Charles Baker Harris, the small, imaginative boy from Meridian, Mississippi, who spends summers next door with his aunt Rachel and dares the children to make Boo Radley come out.
Q 06Which famous writer was the real-life model for Dill?
Truman Capote
Truman Capote, born Truman Persons, spent childhood summers next door to Harper Lee in Alabama, living with his mother's relatives; Lee drew the character of Dill from him.
Q 07What is the first name of the reclusive neighbour known as "Boo" Radley?
Arthur
Boo Radley's real name is Arthur Radley; shut inside the house since a teenage scrape with the law, he is the subject of the children's rumours and ultimately saves them.
Q 08Who is Atticus appointed to defend?
Tom Robinson
Judge Taylor appoints Scout's father to defend Tom Robinson, a Black field hand accused of raping a white woman; he takes the case seriously despite the town's hostility.
Q 09Who is the young white woman whose accusation leads to the trial?
Mayella Ewell
Mayella Ewell, the 19-year-old eldest of the Ewell children, is the accuser; the trial suggests she made advances to the defendant and was beaten by her father for it.
Q 10How does Scout break up the lynch mob that confronts Atticus outside the jail?
By chatting to a classmate's father
Recognising Mr. Cunningham and talking to him heart-to-heart shames the men into dispersing.
Q 11From where do Jem, Scout and Dill watch the trial?
The colored balcony
The three children watch from the colored balcony, where Reverend Sykes, pastor of the Black church, finds them seats after the white section downstairs is full.
Q 12Which animal must Atticus shoot in the street, read by critics as a symbol of facing prejudice alone?
A rabid dog
The rabid dog, Tim Johnson, staggers down the street and Scout's father, nicknamed 'One-Shot Finch' in his youth, drops it with a single rifle shot.
Q 13Which elderly neighbour fighting a morphine addiction gives Jem a lesson in courage?
Mrs. Dubose
Q 21Harper Lee's father, the model for Atticus, never took another criminal case after what happened in 1919?
Two Black men he defended were convicted and hanged
In 1919 Amasa Coleman Lee defended two Black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper; both were convicted and hanged, and he never took another criminal case afterwards.
Q 22Which Alabama man, tried for rape near Monroeville in the 1930s, likely inspired the novel's defendant?
Walter Lett
Walter Lett, a Black man convicted in the 1930s of raping a white woman near Monroeville, had his death sentence commuted after local letters questioned the charge; Lee's father's newspaper covered the case.
Q 23Which editor at J. B. Lippincott guided Lee's early manuscript into To Kill a Mockingbird?
Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose makes Scout's brother read to her every afternoon as punishment for wrecking her camellias; she dies free of morphine, which their father calls real courage.
Q 14After the trial, who vows revenge and spits in Atticus's face?
Bob Ewell
Bob Ewell, the accuser's father, spits in the lawyer's face and swears revenge; he later prowls around Judge Taylor's house and harasses the dead defendant's widow, Helen.
Q 15Jem and Scout are attacked while walking home from what event?
A school pageant
The attack comes after the Halloween pageant at the school, where Scout, dressed as a ham, had fallen asleep backstage and missed her cue.
Q 16What injury does Jem suffer in the attack?
A fractured arm
He is knocked unconscious, and a mysterious man carries him home; Scout realises it is Boo Radley.
Q 17How does Sheriff Tate decide to report Bob Ewell's death in order to protect Boo?
He fell on his own knife
Sheriff Heck Tate insists the attacker fell on his own knife, refusing to drag the shy Boo into the limelight; Scout agrees that exposing him would be like shooting a mockingbird.
Q 18Why, as Miss Maudie explains to Scout, is it a sin to kill a mockingbird?
They just sing for people's enjoyment
Miss Maudie gives Scout the explanation after Atticus lets the children shoot bluejays with their Christmas air rifles.
Q 19Which 19th-century essayist supplies the novel's epigraph, "Lawyers, I suppose, were children once"?
Charles Lamb
The epigraph 'Lawyers, I suppose, were children once' comes from Charles Lamb, the English essayist of Essays of Elia (1823), and sets up the book's child's-eye view of the law.
Q 20Where did Lee take the surname Finch from?
Her mother's maiden name
Finch was the maiden name of Harper Lee's mother, Frances Cunningham Finch; the bird surname sits alongside the mockingbird motif that runs through the novel.
Tay Hohoff
Tay Hohoff, a senior editor at J. B. Lippincott, spent more than two years guiding Lee's rewrites; she saw 'the spark of the true writer' in the first manuscript.
Q 24Which award did To Kill a Mockingbird win in 1961?
The Pulitzer Prize
To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, less than a year after publication, while the book was still on the bestseller lists.
Q 25Harper Lee gave her last interview to a journalist in which year?
1964
Lee's last full interview was with Roy Newquist for WQXR radio in 1964; after that she refused press requests and stayed out of public life until her death in February 2016.
Q 26In a 1964 interview, Lee said she aspired to be the Jane Austen of which place?
South Alabama
Lee told Roy Newquist in 1964 that all she wanted was to be 'the Jane Austen of south Alabama', a chronicler of small-town life in her own corner of the state.
Q 27Which US president awarded Harper Lee the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007?
George W. Bush
President George W. Bush presented Harper Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House on 5 November 2007, citing the novel's influence on American character.
Q 28Go Set a Watchman, published in 2015, was what in relation to To Kill a Mockingbird?
An earlier draft
Completed in 1957, it follows an adult Scout visiting Maycomb from New York twenty years after the novel's events.
Q 29The title Go Set a Watchman comes from which book of the Bible?
Isaiah
The title comes from Isaiah 21:6, 'Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth', which the minister Mr. Stone takes as his text in the novel.
Q 30Who played Atticus Finch in the 1962 film?
Gregory Peck
Gregory Peck won the 1963 Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in the 1962 film; Lee said the part gave him 'an opportunity to play himself'.