HARPER LEE
And To Kill a Mockingbird
EARLY LIFE
 (Nelle) Harper Lee wrote about what was familiar to her
 Born April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama
 Parents: Amasa Coleman Lee, descendent of Gen. Robert E. Lee,
and Frances Finch Lee
 Grew up during the Great Depression
 Older sister Alice and Father practiced law
EARLY LIFE CONT.
 Attended public schools
 First year of college: Huntington College
 Followed with a year as an exchange student at Oxford University
in England
 Studied law at the University of Alabama from 1945-1949
 6 months prior to completing her law degree, moved to NYC 1950
and became an airline reservation clerk.
WRITING CAREER
 Began writing at the age of seven
 Was convinced by a literary agent to submit pieces to him
 He advised she expand one of the short stories submitted into a
novel
 Submitted her novel to Lippincott in 1957, but it was not
published until 1960 after a great deal of rewriting
 Lee considers herself “more of a rewriter than a writer.”
THE NOVEL T O KILL A
MOCKINGBIRD
 Began as a short story
 Lee was supported by friend who encouraged her to quit her job
to write full-time.
 Won the Pulitzer Prize
 Reflects Lee’s childhood in Alabama
 Focuses on role of “the Negro” in Southern Life
THE NOVEL TKAM
 Deals not with civil rights, but with human dignity
 Dignity should be based on human merit, not racial origin
 Principal character: Atticus Finch, resembles Lee’s father
• Humble, intelligent, hardworking
 Scout: tomboy who resembles Lee
 Personal Experience: Boo Radley’s house resembles similar house from Lee’s
childhood
• Fantasy, superstition, and curiosity
Lee often visited father’s office as Scout visits Atticus
BACKGROUND:
THE EARLY SOUTH
 Colonial times: large cotton plantations and small cities
 Need for cheap labor allowed slavery to take a stronghold there.
 Plantation owners formed a aristocracy and the slaves gained a
measure of economic security
 Poorer white farmers owned small pieces of land or worked as
share croppers.
CIVIL WAR 1861-65
 Machines decreased need for slavery ex: cotton gin
 2 extremes: set free or total disregard
 Carpetbaggers made worse
• Northerners did nothing to help freed slaves
• Southerners took hostility felt toward “Yankees” out on Negros
 Civil War Colored man meant 2 things to white Southerner
• Slave forcibly given equal rights of former master
• Symbol of defeat…reminder of what North did to South
POST CIVIL WAR
 New farming methods left many in rural South extremely poor
 1929 – Great Depression : farmers suffered most because dependent
on land entirely for living
• Crops rotted
• No $ for seed
 1932 new era ushered in with Franklin Roosevelt
 Fed govt. took active interest in working man
 Laws regulated farm production, labor unions, and social security
NOVEL IN ITS SETTING
 1930’s Southern Life
 Finches once had large successful plantation
 Ancestors had been aristocrats of the South
 Cunninghams have nothing but their land
 Atticus is a lawyer
 Sister, Alexandra still making a living on Finch’s Landing
 Ewells illustrate extremes of poverty as well as Negroes
• Ewells bc won’t do anything about it
• Negros bc nobody will let them do anything about it.