Context
Author
- Nelly Harper Lee was born on 28th April, 1926 in a small town in Alabama
- her hometown Monroeville was similar to Maycomb, the town in which the happenings of To Kill a Mockingbird take place
- characters and events in the book were inspired by Harper Lee‘s own childhood
- Lee‘s father was a lawyer just like Atticus Finch
- her childhood friend and future author Truman Capote inspired the character Dill
- when she was 5 years old, some black men were accused of having raped two white women close to Scottsboro
- it took Lee almost 7 years to complete her novel To Kill a Mockingbird and it was published in 1960, just before the American civil rights movement started
- after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee retreated from the public, she was neither available for interviews nor did she write the screenplay for the movie "To Kill a Mockingbird"
- only published a few short pieces after her success with To Kill a Mockingbird
- the sequel Go Set a Watchman was published in 2015 - it focuses on Scout being 20 years older than in the first novel and on her returning to Maycomb to find out her father had turned into a racist anti-integrationist
- it is not quite clear whether Lee consented to the publishing of that specific sequel
- Harper Lee died in 2016 at the age of 89
- the novel To Kill a Mockingbird remains a classic for its condemnation of childhood innocence and its affirmation that the goodness in humans can overcame the evil sides
Scottsboro Boys Trial
- To Kill a Mockingbird is losely based on some real events, one of them being the Scottsboro Boys Trial
- some white teenagers started a fight with a few black teenagers in 1931, yet the white boys blamed the black boys, also two white women claimed that they had been raped
- the police arrested nine black teenagers, some of them as young as 12 years old
- the group of black boys were known as the Scottsboro Boys
- those boys did not attain proficient lawyers (real-estate lawyers and a lawyer who only had a few years of practice)
- many American citizens and lawyers deemed those trials as unfair and merely driven by racial prejudice
- some thought that the women were lying in order to get those men arrested
- due to that and since people believed that the all-white jury was biased, the cases reached first the Alabama Supreme Court and afterwards the US Supreme Court
- there, charges against four of the defendants were dropped; four other defendants either escaped or were released from jail; one defendant receiving the death sentence went into hiding and wrote a book about his experiences after he was being pardoned
- in 2013, three defendants received posthumous pardons
- this case contributed to the storyline of Harper Lee‘s novel as well
- however, she downplays the racism in it since Tom has a rather competent lawyer who believes in his innocence and he also escapes his sentence
Reception
- some critics claimed that the narrative voice of a 9-year-old girl was not convincing and rather unreliable as well as they found the protagonist overly sententious
- yet, the book became a huge success, also due to the racially charged atmosphere in the 1960s
- the novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961
- due to its popularity, the novel was turned into a movie just two years after it was published - the movie also won an award (Academy Award)