Harper Lee To Kill A Mocking Bird

Harper Lee is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the brilliantly written To Kill a Mocking Bird. The book internationally became a best seller and was also made into an Academy Award winning movie in 1962. Although Lee’s contribution to literature has been limited to only one novel, she has achieved what many writers can only wish for even after writing many novels. Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. Lee’s father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was a lawyer and member of the Alabama State Legislature. Her mother, Frances Finch Lee, was mentally ill and mostly stayed inside the house. Lee was the youngest child of her parents with 3 siblings. She had two older sisters, Alice Finch Lee and Louise Lee Connor, and an older brother,

She attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery where she focused on her studies and writing instead of makeup, clothes and dating like the other girls her age. She was also a member of the glee club and the literary honorary society. Lee then enrolled in the University of Alabama, where she studied Law from 1945 to 1949. Pursuing her interest in writing, Lee wrote for a humorous school magazine, Rammer Jammer and later became its editor. However, the pressure of her law studies forced her to leave the editor’s position. She also went to Oxford University as an exchange student for one year. Soon after returning from Oxford, Lee realized her career was in writing and not law. She dropped out of the university and moved to New York in 1950 where she worked at an airline agency as a reservations officer. It was during her time in New York that she wrote and finished the manuscript of To Kill a Mocking Bird in

Themes ranging from inappropriate language, to racism, to references to rape have caused Lee’s novel to be so heavily questioned. Throughout the decades following the novel’s publication, the popularity of the novel has fluctuated with the social climate of that time and various social happenings could have added fuel to the fire of hatred against To Kill a Mockingbird. Although the novel was highly honored and commended when it was first released, that was short-lived as people began to take offense to the material in the novel. For example, Lee writes for her character Scout, “‘Do you defend niggers, Atticus?’ I asked him that evening. ‘Of course I do. Don’t say nigger, Scout. That’s common’” (Lee 99).

In 1991, the Library of Congress conducted in survey in which they asked readers to cite books that have made impacts on their lives. The Bible was the only book ranked higher than To Kill a Mockingbird. It is easy to tell that To Kill a Mockingbird is a true classic, as it is still relevant to this very day. Everything that has happened in Harper Lee’s life – from the Scottsboro Trials to her friendship with Truman Capote – has affected her writing of To Kill a Mockingbird. These aspects of her life have shown up as events in her book or her unique writing style. In American literature, few