During which economic era is To Kill a Mockingbird set?

To Kill a Mockingbird is set during the Great Depression.

The novel’s main events occur in the fictional Maycomb, Alabama, during 1933–35, when the United States was enduring severe unemployment, poverty, bank failures, and economic insecurity. The period gives the story’s social conflicts a material as well as racial context.

Many families in Maycomb struggle financially. Atticus Finch is sometimes paid with goods such as food or firewood, while the Cunningham family pays debts through farm produce. The Ewells’ poverty is more extreme, though the novel also shows how social prejudice and moral failure cannot be explained by poverty alone.

The setting is sometimes confused with the Progressive Era, Reconstruction, or the Gilded Age. Those periods belong to earlier parts of American history; the novel’s courtroom story and childhood memories are specifically rooted in the Depression-era South.