To kill a mockingbird

1. Harper Lee’s To kill a mockingbird

2. Author • (Nelle) Harper Lee, born in Monroeville, Alabama in 1926, has only this one novel to her credit, but it has been enough to earn her a Pulitzer Prize and a wide audience. • The character Atticus is apparently based on Lee’s father, who practiced law in Monroeville. • To Kill a Mockingbird was a best seller for a period of eighty weeks (almost two years). • Miss Lee was awarded the Alabama Literary Association Award. She was the first woman since 1942 to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She also received many awards in foreign countries. In Britain,for example, it was selected British Book of the Year. This is an unusual mount of honor to be placed on one book, especially an author's first book.

3. History • When the United States was still a colony of Britain, that is prior to 1776, the South grew into an area of large cotton plantations and small cities. Because of the need for cheap labor to pick and seed the cotton, black slavery took a strong hold. By 1776, there were over half a million slaves in the United States. As plantation owners grew more prosperous, they formed an upper class or landed aristocracy. The black slaves were treated very poorly, and often worse than animals. Often slaves were bought and sold. However, other white people felt the issue of slavery to be wrong, and Lincoln declared the abolition of slavery as a part of the war issues during the Civil War of 1861. • During the Civil War, the cotton gin had been developed, making it possible to farm cotton without the need for slaves, but the long devastating war had smashed the economy in the south.

4. History cont. • New methods of farming and textile production eventually made many rural Southerners poor. • Some moved away west or to the cities, others stuck to the land to scrape up what living they could. • In the age of industrialization and railroads, the north-east United States flourished while the South suffered severely. • Most plantations were sold bit by bit until hardly any wealthy landowners remained. When the Great Depression of 1929 hit the world, the Southern farmers who depended on their land for farming suffered the most. The crops had rotted, and they had little money for seed to plant new ones.

5. Structure • To Kill a Mockingbird is divided into two parts: • Part I deals with the children’s efforts to lure Boo Radley, the neighbourhood recluse, into the light of day. • Part II centers on Atticus’s attempt to acquit Tom Robinson for the rape of a white woman and lure the truth about the crime into the light of the courtroom • The two plots appear quite separate at first, but thematically they mirror each other as, respectively, a childhood and an adult version of precisely the same conflicts.

6. Setting and Atmosphere • In the early 1930’s, the small town of Maycomb, Alabama, shows the effects of the Depression. • The general hard times require that the community draw on its values of compassion, generosity, and endurance, and the Southern caste structure ensures that these values will come into conflict with deep-seated prejudices.

7. Point of View • Scout tells the story herself as she ages from six to eight in order to understand it for the first time, with some personal distance required. • However, the story is not told by a six-year-old narrator; instead, the narrator is trying to record her world as it appeared to her when she was six years old.

8. Major Themes • Prejudice (racial injustice) • Growing Up • Innocence • Conscience versus Society • Courage versus Cowardice • Gender Roles (motif)

9. Finding Definition Define and provide an example: Courage Prejudice Growing Up Losing battles Education

10. Let’s Consider… • Human beings, for the most part, have a tendency to want to list rules. Some examples are: • The Ten Commandments • Holy Rosary’s School Rules • But what rules- or hidden laws- truly govern your world, your school, your family, your life?