Harper Lee Style Essay

The Unique Style of Harper Lee Classic American Novelist Harper Lee writes the famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird based on the 1930’s great depression and separate but equal era in the south. Lee portrays the upcoming of two children in Maycomb, Alabama; a southern town that was greatly segregated. Lee’s purpose is to display that how one is raised affects how they come of age, based off her life Scout comes of age quick due to her southern roots. Harper Lee incorporates imagery and characterization in order to portray the small town of Maycomb and it’s citizen’s during a time when segregation was at a high. Lee introduces the small town of Maycomb through imagery to help the reader understand coming of age in Maycomb. Lee describes Maycomb as a “tired old town” that had “nothing to fear but itself” in the middle of Alabama, that was divided greatly by race (Lee 6). Scout shows how growing up in a town that is divided with citizens that have differing opinions has a toll on the childhood and upbringing of a kid in Maycomb such as Scout or Jem.

Lee describes the Finch’s maid Calpurnia as “all angles and bones” she was “always ordering around” Jem and Scout “telling them to get out of the kitchen” she “was something else” (Lee 6-7). The fact that the two Finch children were raised by a african american women while their father was at work gave them a different look on blacks that were seen as less by the white citizens of Maycomb. Scout’s father Atticus was “related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in the town” he was “satisfactory” he would “play, read, and treat them with courteous detachment,” Atticus was a “Lawyer” and a good one at that (Lee 5-6). Having only a father alive to raise the two kids, Scout and Jem had a harder life than some of the other town kids, with only a father's advice they had a unique coming of