To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
A lawyer’s counsel to his kids while defending the actual To Kill a Mockingbird, a black man wrongfully accused of raping a white girl in Harper Lee’s iconic novel. Harper Lee tackles the absurdity of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s via the youthful perspectives of Scout and Jem Finch with irrepressible humour. The tenacity of one man’s fight for justice wounded the conscience of a town rife with prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy. But history’s weight will only put up with so much. To Kill a Mockingbird is a masterpiece of the Southern literary canon and a coming-of-age story, an anti-racist novel, Great Depression-era historical drama.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
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Through the eyes of the main character Scout, or Jean Louise Finch to use her real name, the plot explores many facets of life in mid-’30s Alabama. Nobody ever gives a reason behind the moniker. Scout is six years old when the novel begins, which is two years younger than Harper Lee would have been at the same age. Her older brother Jem (Jeremy) and a neighbour’s nephew Dill join her on her escapades (Charles Baker Harris). The book shows not just how two races regard one another, but also how certain segments of the white race view one another. White poverty during the Great Depression is one of the first issues brought up in the book.
Later it was discovered that Truman Capote, a recently deceased author and Harper Lee’s next-door neighbour, was closely modelled on Dill.
At least at the beginning of the book, Scout’s father, attorney Atticus Finch, is a well-respected leader in the town and a member of the State Legislature. Harper Lee actually grew up in Alabama, where her father was a lawyer who got involved in a rape case resembling the one described in the book. The Scottsboro Boys’ trials in Alabama for the rape of two white women by nine black adolescents may also have had an impact on Harper Lee. The original trials, which took place in 1931, are now typically viewed as momentous miscarriages.
