To Kill a Mockingbird - General Information

Seite 1

To Kill a Mockingbird

Context

Nelle Harper Lee was born on

April 28, 1926, in Monroeville,

Alabama, a sleepy small town similar in many ways to Maycomb, the

setting of To Kill a Mockingbird. Like Atticus

Finch, the father of Scout, the narrator and protagonist of To

Kill a Mockingbird, Lee’s father was a lawyer. Among Lee’s

childhood friends was the future novelist and essayist Truman Capote,

from whom she drew inspiration for the character Dill. These personal

details notwithstanding, Lee maintains that To Kill a Mockingbird was

intended to portray not her own childhood home but rather a nonspecific Southern

town. “People are people anywhere you put them,” she declared in

a 1961 interview.

Yet the book’s setting and characters are not the only

aspects of the story shaped by events that occurred during Lee’s

childhood. In 1931, when Lee was five, nine

young black men were accused of raping two white women near Scottsboro,

Alabama. After a series of lengthy, highly publicized, and often

bitter trials, five of the nine men were sentenced to long prison

terms. Many prominent lawyers and other American citizens saw the

sentences as spurious and motivated only by racial prejudice. It

was also suspected that the women who had accused the men were lying,

and in appeal after appeal, their claims became more dubious. There

can be little doubt that the Scottsboro Case, as the trials of the

nine men came to be called, served as a seed for the trial that

stands at the heart of Lee’s novel.

Lee began To Kill a Mockingbird in the

mid-1950s, after moving to New York to become

a writer. She completed the novel in 1957 and

published it, with revisions, in 1960, just

before the peak of the American civil rights movement.

Critical response to To Kill a Mockingbird was

mixed: a number of critics found the narrative voice of a nine-year-old

girl unconvincing and called the novel overly moralistic. Nevertheless,

in the racially charged atmosphere of the early 1960s,

the book became an enormous popular success, winning the Pulitzer

Prize in 1961 and selling over fifteen million

copies. Two years after the book’s publication, an Academy Award–winning

film version of the novel, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch,

was produced. Meanwhile, the author herself had retreated from the

public eye: she avoided interviews, declined to write the screenplay

for the film version, and published only a few short pieces after 1961. To

Kill a Mockingbird remains her sole published novel. Lee

eventually returned to Monroeville and continues to live there.

In 1993, Lee penned a brief foreword

to her book. In it she asks that future editions of To Kill

a Mockingbird be spared critical introductions. “Mockingbird,”

she writes, “still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive

the years without preamble.” The book remains a staple of high school

and college reading lists, beloved by millions of readers worldwide

for its appealing depiction of childhood innocence, its scathing

moral condemnation of racial prejudice, and its affirmation that

human goodness can withstand the assault of evil.

Lee began To Kill a Mockingbird in the

mid-1950s, after moving to New York to become

a writer. She completed the novel in 1957 and

published it, with revisions, in 1960, just

before the peak of the American civil rights movement.

To Kill a Mockingbird - Plot Overview

To kill a mocking bird - Characters