To Kill a Mockingbird is an unpublished short story.
American literature is the literature written or produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies . Atticus Finch is a fictional character in author Harper Lee 's Pulitzer Prize winning novel of 1960 , To Kill a Mockingbird . To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960 . The narrator 's father , Atticus Finch , has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers . As a Southern Gothic novel and a Bildungsroman , the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence .