Maharashtra

National law University,

Aurangabad
(Batch-2017-22)
Semester - I
B.A.LLB

Project - English

Submitted to Submitted by
Ms. Mahenaz Payal golimar
Haque
MAKING OF WRITER
Harper Lee of Alabama

To Kill a Mocking Bird is set in the town of Monroeville, Alabama, where Pulitzer Prize-
winning author Harper Lee grew up. Harper Lee arrived in the world on April 28, 1926 in
Monroeville, Alabama. She was the youngest of the four siblings and never really had
any family responsibilities to take care of.
Apparently, she was a tomboy whereas for the opposite part of her persona, she was an
avid reader and used to invest major chunk of her time in penning down her thoughts
and ideas in form of short stories or notes. Gradually, her passion for writing grew
stronger and she left her studies. Her writing portfolio is made of a number of short
stories for children and adults based on moral issues as well as her masterpiece—To Kill
A Mockingbird.
Narration of To Kill a Mocking Bird
Harper Lee had the habit of communicating simple messages to her readers in simple
words which has been reflected in every piece that comprised her work. In the novel To
Kill A Mockingbird, Lee has loosely linked the characters and events to her personal life.
The book is a narration by a young school girl Scout who lives with her brother Jem and
father Atticus Finch. Scout, Jem and their friend Dill are unaware of the norms of ‘social
discrimination’ and treat everyone alike. Atticus is an attorney and major part of the
novel revolves around a legal case in which a Negro is falsely accused of raping a white
woman—the Negro is saved from conviction by Atticus who, as a consequence has to
go through a number of scourges.
Lee’s Perspective
Lee sees herself as Scout whose mind was as pure as hers. Her father was an editor cum
lawyer who highlighted the rights of blacks through his writings and his active
contribution in Alabama State Legislature from 1926 to 1938. When Lee was ten years
of age, she came across the unfortunate case of a group of nine black boys called
‘Scottsboro Boys’ which left a dark impression on his mind—each one of the nine boys
were sentenced to death on the fake charge of raping two white women. The message
which Lee wanted to put across was that children are innocent and do not have the
ability to recognize evil unless they are forced to experience it. It is we, the adults, who
have given birth (and fuel) to the concepts of prejudice and racism in the society
whereas children strongly disapprove of any such convention.

WRITING STYLE OF AUTHOR

Harper Lee’s style in To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee’s style in To Kill a Mockingbird might be characterized as down-home.
Her diction, while reflective of the time and place rides a crucial line between
sophisticated and colloquial speech that would be representative of Scout’s intellect and
surroundings. She further deftly weaves numerous anecdotes together to show, as
opposed to tell, the reader about the setting and characters.

FAMOUS WORKS

While pursuing the career that would ultimately produce To Kill a

Mockingbird, Lee worked briefly in the early 1950s as a reservations
clerk for Eastern Airlines and BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corp.) in
New York City. In 1957, she 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, her first and only novel, was published in 1960

In the early 1960s, shortly after publication of To Kill a Mockingbird,

Harper Lee accompanied her childhood friend Truman Capote — the
basis for the Dill Harris character — to Holcomb, Kansas, and served as
a research assistant for Capote's 1966 novel, In Cold Blood.

Lee also published three articles in the '60s: "Love — In Other Words"
in Vogue (1961), "Christmas to Me" in McCall's (1961), and "When
Children Discover America" in McCall's (1965). President Lyndon
Johnson named Lee to the National Council of Arts in 1966.

In 1998, the Harper Lee Award for a Distinguished Alabama Writer was
unveiled by the executive committee of the Alabama Writers' Forum.
This award recognizes an accomplished writer who was born in the state
or who lived in Alabama during his or her formative years.

Lee died in 2016 at the age of 89.

AWARDS
-Pulitzer Prize, 1961 -Brotherhood Award of the
National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1961 -Alabama
Library Association Award, 1961 -
Bestsellers Paperback of the Year Award 1962
-Member national council on the art, 1966 -Best Novel of the
Century by the Library Journal, 1999. -
Alabama Humanities Award, 2002 -ATTY Award from Spector
Gadon & Rosen Foundation, 2005 -Los Angeles Public
Library Literary Award, 2005 -Presidential
Medal of Freedom, 2007. In 2006, -
University of Notre Dame, 2006 -American Academy of
Arts and Letters, 2007 "To Kill A
Mockingbird" is one of the most famous American novels of all time, and
has sold millions of copies worldwide.
BACKGROUND OF THE STORY

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, a
sleepy small town similar in many ways to Maycomb, the setting of To
Kill a Mockingbird. Like Atticus Finch , the father of Scout, the narrator and
protagonist of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee’s father was a lawyer. Among
Lee’s childhood friends was the future novelist and essayist Truman
Capote, from whom she drew inspiration for the character Dill. These
personal details notwithstanding, Lee maintains that To Kill a
Mockingbird was intended to portray not her own childhood home but
rather a nonspecific Southern town. “People are people anywhere you
put them,” she declared in a 1961 interview.
Yet the book’s setting and characters are not the only aspects of the
story shaped by events that occurred during Lee’s childhood. In 1931,
when Lee was five, nine young black men were accused of raping two
white women near Scottsboro, Alabama. After a series of lengthy, highly
publicized, and often bitter trials, five of the nine men were sentenced to
long prison terms. Many prominent lawyers and other American citizens
saw the sentences as spurious and motivated only by racial prejudice. It
was also suspected that the women who had accused the men were
lying, and in appeal after appeal, their claims became more dubious.
There can be little doubt that the Scottsboro Case, as the trials of the
nine men came to be called, served as a seed for the trial that stands at
the heart of Lee’s novel.

Lee began To Kill a Mockingbird in the mid-1950s, after moving to New

York to become a writer. She completed the novel in 1957 and published
it, with revisions, in 1960, just before the peak of the American civil rights
movement.
Critical response to To Kill a Mockingbird was mixed: a number of critics
found the narrative voice of a nine-year-old girl unconvincing and called
the novel overly moralistic. Nevertheless, in the racially charged
atmosphere of the early 1960s, the book became an enormous popular
success. To Kill a Mocking bird remains her sole published novel.
In 1993, Lee penned a brief foreword to her book. In it she asks that
future editions of To Kill a Mockingbird be spared critical introductions.
“Mockingbird,” she writes, “still says what it has to say; it has managed
to survive the years without preamble.” The book remains a staple of
high school and college reading lists, beloved by millions of readers
worldwide for its appealing depiction of childhood innocence, its scathing
moral condemnation of racial prejudice, and its affirmation that human
goodness can withstand the assault of evil.
INTRODUCTION
To Kill a Mockingbird, novel by Harper Lee, published in 1960. An
enormously popular novel, it was translated into some 40 languages and
sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, and it won a Pulitzer Prize in
1961. The novel has been widely praised for its sensitive treatment of a
child’s awakening to racism and prejudice in the American South.

SUMMARY
To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in Alabama during the Depression, and is narrated
by the main character, a little girl named Jean Louise "Scout" Finch. Her
father, Atticus Finch, is a lawyer with high moral standards. Scout, her brother Jem,
and their friend Dill are intrigued by the local rumours about a man named Boo
Radley, who lives in their neighbourhood but never leaves his house. Legend has
it that he once stabbed his father in the leg with a pair of scissors, and he is made
out to be a kind of monster. Dill is from Mississippi but spends his summer in
Maycomb at a house near the Finch's.
The children are curious to know more about Boo, and during one summer
create a mini-drama they enact daily, which tells the events of his life as they
know them. Slowly, the children begin moving closer to the Radley house, which
is said to be haunted. They try leaving notes for Boo on his windowsill with a
fishing pole, but are caught by Atticus, who firmly reprimands them for making
fun of a sad man's life. Next, the children try sneaking over to the house at night
and looking through its windows. Boo's brother, Nathan Radley, who lives in the
house, thinks he hears a prowler and fires his gun. The children run away, but
Jem loses his pants in a fence. When he returns in the middle of the night to get
them back, they have been neatly folded and the tear from the fence roughly
sewn up.

Other mysterious things happen to the Finch children. A certain tree near the
Radley house has a hole in which little presents are often left for them, such as
pennies, chewing gum, and soap carved figures of a little boy and girl who bear a
striking resemblance to Scout and Jem. The children don't know where these gifts
are coming from, and when they go to leave a note for the mystery giver, they
find that Boo's brother has plugged up the hole with cement. The next winter
brings unexpected cold and snow, and Miss Maudie's house catches on fire. While
Jem and Scout, shivering, watch the blaze from near the Radley house, someone
puts a blanket around Scout without her realizing it. Not until she returns home
and Atticus asks her where the blanket came from does she realize that Boo
Radley must have put it around her while she was entranced by watching Miss
Maudie, her favorite neighbor, and her burning house.

Atticus decides to take on a case involving a black man named Tom Robinson who
has been accused of raping a very poor white girl named Mayella Ewell, a member
of the notorious Ewell family, who belong to the layer of Maycomb society that
people refer to as "trash." The Finch family faces harsh criticism in the heavily
racist Maycomb because of Atticus's decision to defend Tom. But, Atticus insists
on going through with the case because his conscience could not let him do
otherwise. He knows Tom is innocent, and also that he has almost no chance at
being acquitted, because the white jury will never believe a black man over a
white woman. Despite this, Atticus wants to reveal the truth to his fellow
townspeople, expose their bigotry, and encourage them to imagine the possibility
of racial equality.
Because Atticus is defending a black man, Scout and Jem find themselves
whispered at and taunted, and have trouble keeping their tempers. At a family
Christmas gathering, Scout beats up her cloying relative Francis when he accuses
Atticus of ruining the family name by being a "nigger-lover". Jem cuts off the tops
of an old neighbor's flower bushes after she derides Atticus, and as punishment,
has to read out loud to her every day. Jem does not realize until after she dies
that he is helping her break her morphine addiction. When revealing this to Jem
and Scout, Atticus holds this old woman up as an example of true courage: the
will to keep fighting even when you know you can't win.
The time for the trial draws closer, and Atticus's sister Alexandra comes to stay
with the family. She is proper and old-fashioned and wants to shape Scout into
the model of the Southern feminine ideal, much to Scout's resentment. Dill runs
away from his home, where his mother and new father don't seem interested in
him, and stays in Maycomb for the summer of Tom's trial. The night before the
trial, Tom is moved into the county jail, and Atticus, fearing a possible lynching,
stands guard outside the jail door all night. Jem is concerned about him, and the
three children sneak into town to find him. A group of men arrive ready to cause
some violence to Tom, and threaten Atticus in the process. At first Jem, Scout and
Dill stand aside, but when she senses true danger, Scout runs out and begins to
speak to one of the men, the father of one of her classmates in school. Her
innocence brings the crowd out of their mob mentality, and they leave.

The trial pits the evidence of the white Ewell family against Tom's evidence.
According to the Ewells, Mayella asked Tom to do some work for her while her
father was out, and Tom came into their house and forcibly beat and raped
Mayella until her father appeared and scared him away. Tom's version is that
Mayella invited him inside, then threw her arms around him and began to kiss
him. Tom tried to push her away. When Bob Ewell arrived, he flew into a rage
and beat her, while Tom ran away in fright. According to the sheriff's testimony,
Mayella's bruises were on the right side of her face, which means she was most
likely punched with a left hand. Tom Robinson's left arm is useless due to an old
accident, whereas Mr. Ewell leads with his left. Given the evidence of reasonable
doubt, Tom should go free, but after hours of deliberation, the jury pronounces
him guilty. Scout, Jem and Dill sneak into the courthouse to see the trial and sit in
the balcony with Maycomb's black population. They are stunned at the verdict
because to them, the evidence was so clearly in Tom's favor.
Though the verdict is unfortunate, Atticus feels some satisfaction that the jury
took so long deciding. Usually, the decision would be made in minutes, because a
black man's word would not be trusted. Atticus is hoping for an appeal, but
unfortunately Tom tries to escape from his prison and is shot to death in the
process. Jem has trouble handling the results of the trial, feeling that his trust in
the goodness and rationality of humanity has been betrayed.

Meanwhile, Mr. Ewell threatens Atticus and other people connected with the trial
because he feels he was humiliated. He gets his revenge one night while Jem and
Scout are walking home from the Halloween play at their school. He follows them
home in the dark, then runs at them and attempts to kill them with a large
kitchen knife. Jem breaks his arm, and Scout, who is wearing a confining ham
shaped wire costume and cannot see what is going on, is helpless throughout the
attack. The elusive Boo Radley stabs Mr. Ewell and saves the children. Finally,
Scout has a chance to meet the shy and nervous Boo. At the end of this fateful
night, the sheriff declares that Mr. Ewell fell on his own knife so Boo, the hero of
the situation, won't have to be tried for murder. Scout walks Boo home and
imagines how he has viewed the town and observed her, Jem and Dill over the
years from inside his home. Boo goes inside, closes the door, and she never sees
him again.

Themes
THE COEXISTENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL

The most important theme of To Kill a Mockingbird is the book’s

exploration of the moral nature of human beings—that is, whether
people are essentially good or essentially evil. The novel approaches
this question by dramatizing Scout and Jem’s transition from a perspective
of childhood innocence, in which they assume that people are good
because they have never seen evil, to a more adult perspective, in which
they have confronted evil and must incorporate it into their
understanding of the world. As a result of this portrayal of the transition
from innocence to experience, one of the book’s important subthemes
involves the threat that hatred, prejudice, and ignorance pose to the
innocent: people such as Tom Robinson and Boo Radley are not
prepared for the evil that they encounter, and, as a result, they are
destroyed. Even Jem is victimized to an extent by his discovery of the
evil of racism during and after the trial. Whereas Scout is able to
maintain her basic faith in human nature despite Tom’s conviction, Jem’s
faith in justice and in humanity is badly damaged, and he retreats into a
state of disillusionment.
The moral voice of To Kill a Mockingbird is embodied by Atticus Finch, who
is virtually unique in the novel in that he has experienced and
understood evil without losing his faith in the human capacity for
goodness. Atticus understands that, rather than being simply creatures
of good or creatures of evil, most people have both good and bad
qualities. The important thing is to appreciate the good qualities and
understand the bad qualities by treating others with sympathy and trying
to see life from their perspective. He tries to teach this ultimate moral
lesson to Jem and Scout to show them that it is possible to live with
conscience without losing hope or becoming cynical. In this way, Atticus
is able to admire Mrs. Dubose’s courage even while deploring her
racism. Scout’s progress as a character in the novel is defined by her
gradual development toward understanding Atticus’s lessons,
culminating when, in the final chapters, Scout at last sees Boo Radley as
a human being. Her newfound ability to view the world from his
perspective ensures that she will not become jaded as she loses her
innocence.
THE IMPORTANCE OF MORAL EDUCATION

Because exploration of the novel’s larger moral questions takes place

within the perspective of children, the education of children is
necessarily involved in the development of all of the novel’s themes. In a
sense, the plot of the story charts Scout’s moral education, and the
theme of how children are educated—how they are taught to move from
innocence to adulthood—recurs throughout the novel (at the end of the
book, Scout even says that she has learned practically everything
except algebra). This theme is explored most powerfully through the
relationship between Atticus and his children, as he devotes himself to
instilling a social conscience in Jem and Scout. The scenes at school
provide a direct counterpoint to Atticus’s effective education of his
children: Scout is frequently confronted with teachers who are either
frustratingly unsympathetic to children’s needs or morally hypocritical. As
is true of To Kill a Mockingbird’s other moral themes, the novel’s
conclusion about education is that the most important lessons are those
of sympathy and understanding, and that a sympathetic, understanding
approach is the best way to teach these lessons. In this way, Atticus’s
ability to put himself in his children’s shoes makes him an excellent
teacher, while Miss Caroline’s rigid commitment to the educational
techniques that she learned in college makes her ineffective and even
dangerous.
THE EXISTENCE OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY

Differences in social status are explored largely through the

overcomplicated social hierarchy of Maycomb, the ins and outs of which
constantly baffle the children. The relatively well-off Finches stand near
the top of Maycomb’s social hierarchy, with most of the townspeople
beneath them. Ignorant country farmers like the Cunninghams lie below
the townspeople, and the white trash Ewells rest below the
Cunninghams. But the black community in Maycomb, despite its
abundance of admirable qualities, squats below even the Ewells,
enabling Bob Ewell to make up for his own lack of importance by
persecuting Tom Robinson. These rigid social divisions that make up so
much of the adult world are revealed in the book to be both irrational and
destructive. For example, Scout cannot understand why Aunt Alexandra
refuses to let her consort with young Walter Cunningham. Lee uses the
children’s perplexity at the unpleasant layering of Maycomb society to
critique the role of class status and, ultimately, prejudice in human
interaction.

To Kill A Mockingbird Conclusion

To Kill A Mockingbird is ultimately about growing up. Over the course of the
novel, several important lessons are introduced to Scout, and in the last ten
chapters you see her finally fully realize their true meaning.
At the beginning of the book, when she is talking to Atticus about her first day at
school, he tells her about putting herself in another person’s shoes, considering
things from his or her point of view. It is only at the end of the novel, standing of
the Radley porch, do you see that she fully understands what he was trying to
say. It is in that moment that you can see how much she has truly grown up.
She also learns about racism and courage. Understanding that many of the people
in Maycomb are racist is hard for her and for Jem, especially after watching the
trial. Learning that Tom Robinson will be convicted, even though he is innocent is
difficult for the children to comprehend and hard for them to come to terms with.
Both Scout and Jem learn about courage and also become more aware that
racism exists in the wider world.
Finally, she learns about the mockingbird. Throughout the novel, a mockingbird
has been a symbol of innocence, of someone who has done no harm. When Scout
and Jem receive guns for Christmas one year, Atticus tells Jem that he can, ‘shoot
at all the bluejays he wants, if he can hit them, but remember that it is a sin to kill
a mockingbird.’ You see that Scout understands not only this, but it’s deeper
meaning, when she talks to Atticus about Boo Radley. In a way, she says,
convicting Boo Radley would be like shooting a mockingbird.