'To Kill a Mockingbird' context

'To Kill a Mockingbird' context

1. Harper lee, her life and times

   • Harper Lee was born on the 28th April 1926 and raised in Monroeville, Alabama. She was the youngest of four children of Frances Cunningham (Finch) and Amasa Coleman Lee
     • Harper Lee was the daughter of a lawyer , like Scout. Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, once defended two black men, a father and son, who were accused of murdering a white store clerk. Like Atticus Finch, he was unable to secure an acquittal for his defendants and the two men were hanged.
     • Monroeville was a small town, similar to Maycomb. Both had stately courthouses, neighbors who knew everyone's business, and a mysterious, reclusive resident who fascinated and terrified local children. Lee has stated that Mockingbird was not an autobiographical novel, but that she borrowed scenes and characters from her childhood.
     • Lee was raised with two sisters, Alice and Louise, and a brother, Edwin Coleman Lee. Both her sisters are still living, but her brother died of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage in 1951.
   • "I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me," she said." I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better... all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Albama"
   • In 1944 she joined Huntingdon College, a women's school in Alabama, where she joined a sorority. "In the purely feminine aquifer of sorority life," one of her biographers wrote, the eternally-tomboyish Lee "floated like a drop of motor oil." She left Huntingdon the following year and enrolled in law school at the University of Alabama. In 1949, she quit law school and joined Truman Capote in New York City to pursue a career as a writer.

2. Lee's oeuvre

   • A mocking bird is a songbird with greyish plumage, found mainly in tropical America and noted for its mimicry of the calls and songs of other birds.
   • To Kill a Mockingbird
     • The Novel, told through the eyes of six year old Scout Finch is set in the 1930s looking at racial prejudice in the southern american states, Lee presents this through Scout's Father, Atticus Finch, Representing a Black man in a rape trial. As Scout learns, we learn about the evils of social injustice
     • Characters
       • Scout- Narrator of the Novel; Tomboy; Protagonist
       • Jem- Scout's older brother
       • Atticus Finch - Scouts Father; A lawyer
       • Calpurnia - Black House help; Mother figure; Wise
       • Tom Robinson - Defendant; Religious & kind black man
       • Boo Radley - Scout's Neighbour; Superstitions arounnd him
       • Mayella - Accuses Tom of rape
       • Miss Caroline Fisher - Outsider; Introduces us to the children of Maycomb
       • Bob Ewell - Antagonist; Cruel and abusive
     • In 1957, Harper Lee submitted a manuscript to the J. B. Lippincott Company, who felt that her attempt at a novel was actually more of a series of strung-together short stories. The publisher recommended a rewrite, so Lee spent the next two-and-a-half years working on the manuscript. Her efforts paid off, and To Kill a Mockingbird, was published in 1960.
   • Go Set a Watchman
     • Go Set a Watchman is a novel by Harper Lee published on July 14, 2015, by HarperCollins in the United States and William Heinemann in the United Kingdom.
   • Common themes in Lee's writing involve
     • Southern life and racial injustice
     • Class
     • Courage and compassion
     • Loss of innocence
     • Gender roles

3. American slavery

   • American civil war
     • April 12, 1861 – April 9, 1865
       • The war began when the Confederates bombarded Union soldiers at Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861. The war ended in Spring, 1865. Robert E. Lee surrendered the last major Confederate army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. The last battle was fought at Palmito Ranch, Texas, on May 13, 1865. Click here for a Civil War timeline.
     • Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson writes that, "The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries."

4. Segregation and injustice

   • after the american civil war the southern states were looking to develop systems of racial control, due to the development of cities causing black and white people to be n close proximity
     • In order to prevent friction between the races, the 'Jim Crow' Laws were introduced, which enforced segregation in, hotels, hospitals, restaurants, transports, toilets and Education
   • White trash is a derogatory American English racial slur referring to poor white people, especially in the rural South of the United States, suggesting lower social class and degraded standards of living. The term suggests outcasts from respectable society living on the fringes of the social order, who are seen as dangerous because they may be criminal, unpredictable, and without respect for authority whether it be political, legal, or moral.
   • Dec. 1 1955:Rosa Parks, refuses to give up her seat at the front of the "colored section" of a bus to a white passenger, defying a southern custom of the time. In response to her arrest the Montgomery black community launches a bus boycott, which will last for more than a year, until the buses are desegregated Dec. 21, 1956. As newly elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., is instrumental in leading the boycott.
   • The Klu Klux Klan - or the KKK - is a white supremacist group based in southern america . they are seen as America's first true terrorist group, having a dedication to reach its goals through acts of extreme violence and torture. They generally wear masks, cardboard hats, and white sheets.
     • lynching is a form of punishment commonly defined as "Any act of violence inflicted by a mob upon the body of another person which results in the death of the person." Typically, lynching is done by hanging, and done without any process of law. During post civil war up to the civil rights movement, lynching became a popular way for whites to "release" their anger towards free blacks and those in support of them

5. The Wall street Crash amd the Great Depression

   • When the Wall Street stock market crashed in October 1929, the Global economy was plunged into the Great Depression. By the winter of 1932, America was within the depths of the greatest economic depression in its history. The number of unemployed people reached upwards of 13 million. Many people lived in primitive conditions close to famine. One New York family moved into a cave in Central Park.
   • The depression was caused by the collapse of land prices in Florida. Eventually, there were too many goods being made and not enough people to buy them. Farmers had produced too much food in the 1920s, so prices for their produce became steadily lower. There were too many small banks - these banks did not have enough funds to cope with the sudden rush to take out savings, which happened in the autumn of 1929. Too much speculation on the stock market - the middle class had a lot to lose and they had spent a lot on what amounted to pieces of paper. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 was a massive psychological blow. America had lent huge sums of money to European countries. When the stock market collapsed, they suddenly recalled those loans. This had a devastating impact on the European economy. The collapse of European banks caused a general world financial crisis.

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