Objective: Students will determine what information about Harper Lee is reliable and make an inference about what influence her to create the central themes she presents in "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Harper Lee Biography

Biography #1 http://www.nndb.com/people/572/000025497/

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, to Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Harper Lee grew up in the small southwestern Alabama town of Monroeville. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who also served on the state legislature (1926-38). As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and she enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote, who provided the basis of the character of Dill in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

Lee was only five years old in when, in April 1931 in the small Alabama town of Scottsboro, the first trials began with regard to the purported rapes of two white women by nine young black men. The defendants, who were nearly lynched before being brought to court, were not provided with the services of a lawyer until the first day of trial. Despite medical testimony that the women had not been raped, the all-white jury found the men guilty of the crime and sentenced all but the youngest, a twelve-year-old boy, to death. Six years of subsequent trials saw most of these convictions repealed and all but one of the men freed or paroled. The Scottsboro case left a deep impression on the young Lee, who would use it later as the rough basis for the events in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Lee studied first at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama (1944-45), and then pursued a law degree at the University of Alabama (1945-49), spending one year abroad at Oxford University, England. She worked as a reservation clerk for Eastern Airlines in New York City until the late 1950s, when she resolved to devote herself to writing. Lee lived a frugal lifestyle, traveling between her cold-water-only apartment in New York to her family home in Alabama to care for her ailing father. In addition, she worked in Holcombe, Kansas, as a research assistant for Truman Capote's novel In Cold Blood in 1959. Ever since the first days of their childhood friendship, Capote and Lee remained close friends.

Lee published her first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, in 1960 after a two-year period of revising and rewriting under the guidance of her editor, Tay Hohoff, of the J. B. Lippincott Company. To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize despite mixed critical reviews. The novel was highly popular, selling more than fifteen million copies. Though in composing the novel she delved into her own experiences as a child in Monroeville, Lee intended that the book impart the sense of any small town in the Deep South, as well as the universal characteristics of human beings. The book was made into a successful movie in 1962, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus.

President Johnson named Lee to the National Council of Arts in June 1966, and since then she has received numerous honorary doctorates. She continues to live in New York and Monroeville but prefers a relatively private existence, granting few interviews and giving few speeches. She has published only a few short essays since her debut: "Love--In Other Words" in Vogue, 1961; "Christmas to Me" in McCall's, 1961; and "When Children Discover America" in McCall's, 1965.

Biography #2 http://www.gradesaver.com/author/harper-lee/
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Harper Lee

AKA Nelle Harper Lee

Born: 28-Apr-1926
Birthplace: Monroeville, AL

Gender: Female
Religion: Methodist
Race or Ethnicity: White
Occupation: Novelist

Nationality: United States
Executive summary: To Kill A Mockingbird

Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, a tiny town about halfway between Montgomery and Mobile, where her next-door neighbor and best friend was the pre-pubescent Truman Capote. Her father -- a lawyer and the basis for Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird -- served in the Alabama legislature from 1927 to 1939. He was reportedly a staunch segregationist until the late 1950s, when the increasing civil rights protests caught his attention and sympathies. Despite popular assumption, the family are not distant descendants of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Lee attended three colleges, studied law, and was briefly an exchange student at Oxford, but she received no degrees. By the 1950s she was working as an airline reservations clerk, writing in her free time, until she received a remarkable Christmas present from friends -- a year's wages, without having to work. She argued that they could not afford such generosity, but they insisted that with her talent and a year without distraction, something wonderful would result.

What resulted was To Kill A Mockingbird, published in 1960 and now widely acclaimed as one of the best American novels. It spans three years in the childhood of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, a young Alabama girl, and her older brother Jem, while their widowed father, small-time attorney Atticus Finch, defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Deftly sewing these threads into a story larger than its small-town characters and setting, the book spent eighty weeks on the best-seller list, sold 30,000,000 copies, and has been translated into more than forty languages. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, and was adapted into a film in 1962, starringGregory Peck.

Lee accompanied her old friend Capote as he trekked to Kansas researching In Cold Blood, and she was so deeply involved in that book's creation that by some accounts she deserved co-author credit. Capote was the inspiration for the neighbor boy 'Dill' in To Kill A Mockingbird, and he said that a character in his Other Voices, Other Rooms was based on Lee.

Lee's Christmas benefactors were Broadway lyricist Michael Brown and his wife Joy. Brown is best remembered for his work on the 1955 stage musical House of Flowers from a Capote short story. The play starred Pearl Bailey and Diahann Carroll.

In her last interview, in 1964, Lee said she had "never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird", and that she was having a difficult time writing her next novel. She wrote a few magazine essays after Mockingbird was published, but another novel has never yet appeared under her byline. Now in her 80s, Lee lives with her sister Louise, eschews all publicity, declines all interview requests, and rarely makes public appearances.

Father: Amasa Coleman Lee (lawyer, b. 19-Jul-1880, d. 1962)
Mother: Frances Cunningham (Finch) Lee (d. 1951)
Sister: Alice Lee (attorney, b. 11-Sep-1911)
Sister: Louise Lee (lives with Harper Lee)
Brother: Edwin Coleman Lee (US Air Force officer, b. 1920, d. 1951 cerebral hemorrhage)

    High School: Monroe County High School, Monroe County, AL

    Chi Omega Sorority 

Harper Lee Biography:

     American writer, famous for her race relations novel TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. The book became an international bestseller and was adapted into screen in 1962. Lee was 34 when the work was published, and it has remained her only novel.

"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

     Descendent from Robert E. Lee, the Southern Civil War general, Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama. Her father was a former newspaper editor and proprietor, who had served as a state senator and practiced as a lawyer in Monroeville. Lee studied law at the University of Alabama from 1945 to 1949, and spent a year as an exchange student in Oxford University,
Wellington Square. Six months before finishing her studies, she went to New York to pursue a literary career. She worked as an Airline reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and British Overseas Airways during the 1950s. In 1959 Lee accompanied Truman Capote to Holcombe, Kansas, as a research assistant for Capote's classic 'non-fiction' novel In Cold Blood (1966).

     To Kill a Mockingbird was Lee's first novel. The book is set in Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s. Atticus Finch, a lawyer and a father, defends a black man, Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a poor white girl, Mayella Ewell. The setting and several of the characters are drawn from life - Finch was the maiden name of Lee's mother and the character of Dill was drawn from Capote, Lee's childhood friend.

"But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal - there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States of the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal." (Finch defending Tom Robinson)

     The narrator is Finch's daughter, nicknamed Scout, an immensely intelligent and observant child. She starts the story when she is six and relates many of her experiences, usual interests of a child and collisions with the reality which intrudes into the sheltered world of childhood. Her mother is dead and she tries to keep pace with her older brother Jem. He breaks his arm so badly that it heals shorter than the other. During the humorous and sad events Scout and Jem learn a lesson in good and evil and justice. As Scout's narrative goes on, the reader realize that one watches a personality in the making. Scout tells her story in her own language which is obviously that of a child, but she also analyzes the events from the viewpoint of an already grown-up, mature person. We know that she will not grow to become a stiff society lady and she will never kill a mockingbird or wrong a weak person.

     The first plot tells the story of Boo Radley, who is generally considered deranged, and the second concerns Tom Robinson. A jury of twelve white men refuse to look past the color of man's skin and convict Robinson of a crime he did not commit. Atticus, assigned to defend Tom, loses is court. Bob Ewell, Mayella's father, is obviously guilty of beating her for making sexual
advances toward Tom. Bob attacks Jem and Scout because Atticus has exposed his daughter and him as liars. The children are saved by Boo Radley. Atticus and Calpurnia, the black cook, slowly became the moral centre of the book. They are portrayed as pillars of society who do not share society's prejudices. The story emphasizes that the children are born with an instinct for
justice and absorb prejudices in the socialization process. Tom becomes a scapegoat of society's prejudice and violence. - "Mr. Finch, there's just some kind of men you have to shoot before you can say hidy to 'em. Even then, they ain't worth the bullet it takes to shoot 'em. Ewell 'as one of 'em."

     Although her first novel gained a huge success, Lee did not continue her career as a writer. She returned from New York to Monroeville, where she has lived avoiding interviews. To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into several languages. An illustrated English edition appeared in Moscow in 1977 for propaganda reasons. In the foreword Nadiya Matuzova, Dr.Philol., wrongly stated that "Harper Lee did not live to see her fiftieth birthday," and added perhaps rightly: "But her only, remarkable novel which continued the best traditions of the American authors who wrote about America's South - Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell and many others - will forever belong in the treasure of progressive American literature."

     For further reading: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Joyce Milton, Tessa Krailing (paperback 1984); ToKill a Mockingbird Notes, ed. by Eva Fitzwater( 1984); Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird by Claudia Durst Johnson and Harper Lee (1994 ); You Can Go Home Again by Rebecca Lutterell Bailey (1993); Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, ed. by Harold
Bloom (1995); To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries by Claudia Durst Johnson (1995) - See also other famous writers who have published only one novel during their lifetime: Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1952), Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind, 1936) - About the film:For Harper Lee, the casting was precisely right - the studio had turned down Rock Hudson, who had discovered Lee's novel, and bought the rights for Gregory Peck. Before beginning of his work, Peck went to Alabama and met the real Atticus Finch, Lee's father Amasa Lee. In gratitude for his performance, Lee presented him with her father's own watch. Dill Harris, played by nine-year-old John Megna, was a character based on Lee's childhood friend Truman Capote. The
film appeared at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, and was an immediate popular success. - From Retakes: Behind the Scenes of 500 Classic Movies by John Eastman (1989) and Novels Into Films by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh (1999) - All reviews were not positive: "To Kill a Mockingbird relates the Cult of Childhood to the Negro Problem with disastrous results. Before the intellectual confusion of the project is considered, it should be noted that this is not much of a movie even by purely formal standards." (Andrew Sarris, Village Voice, March 7, 1963)

Social Climate & Setting of the Novel

The Great Depression & Jim Crow Law

The Great Depression

By Nick Taylor, the author of “American-Made” (2008), a history of the Works Progress Administration.

The Great Depression was a worldwide economic crisis that in the United States was marked by widespread unemployment, near halts in industrial production and construction, and an 89 percent decline in stock prices. It was preceded by the so-called New Era, a time of low unemployment when general prosperity masked vast disparities in income.

The start of the Depression is usually pegged to the stock market crash of “Black Tuesday,” Oct. 29, 1929, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 23 percent and the market lost between $8 billion and $9 billion in value. But it was just one in a series of losses during a time of extreme market volatility that exposed those who had bought stocks “on margin” — with borrowed money.

The stock market continued to decline despite brief rallies. Unemployment rose and wages fell for those who continued to work. The use of credit for the purchase of homes, cars, furniture and household appliances resulted in foreclosures and repossessions. As consumers lost buying power industrial production fell, businesses failed, and more workers lost their jobs. Farmers were caught in a depression of their own that had extended through much of the 1920s. This was caused by the collapse of food prices with the loss of export markets after World War I and years of drought that were marked by huge dust storms that blackened skies at noon and scoured the land of topsoil. As city dwellers lost their homes, farmers also lost their land and equipment to foreclosure.

President Herbert Hoover, a Republican and former Commerce secretary, believed the government should monitor the economy and encourage counter-cyclical spending to ease downturns, but not directly intervene. As the jobless population grew, he resisted calls from Congress, governors, and mayors to combat unemployment by financing public service jobs. He encouraged the creation of such jobs, but said it was up to state and local governments to pay for them. He also believed that relieving the suffering of the unemployed was solely up to local governments and private charities.

By 1932 the unemployment rate had soared past 20 percent. Thousands of banks and businesses had failed. Millions were homeless. Men (and women) returned home from fruitless job hunts to find their dwellings padlocked and their possessions and families turned into the street. Many drifted from town to town looking for non-existent jobs. Many more lived at the edges of cities in makeshift shantytowns their residents derisively called Hoovervilles. People foraged in dumps and garbage cans for food.

The presidential campaign of 1932 was run against the backdrop of the Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the Democratic nomination and campaigned on a platform of attention to “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Hoover continued to insist it was not the government’s job to address the growing social crisis. Roosevelt won in a landslide. He took office on March 4, 1933, with the declaration that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Roosevelt faced a banking crisis and unemployment that had reached 24.9 percent. Thirteen to 15 million workers had no jobs. Banks regained their equilibrium after Roosevelt persuaded Congress to declare a nationwide bank holiday. He offered and Congress passed a series of emergency measures that came to characterize his promise of a “new deal for the American people.” The legislative tally of the new administration’s first hundred days reformed banking and the stock market; insured private bank deposits; protected home mortgages; sought to stabilize industrial and agricultural production; created a program to build large public works and another to build hydroelectric dams to bring power to the rural South; brought federal relief to millions, and sent thousands of young men into the national parks and forests to plant trees and control erosion.

The parks and forests program, called the Civilian Conservation Corps, was the first so-called work relief program that provided federally funded jobs. Roosevelt later created a large-scale temporary jobs program during the winter of 1933–34. The Civil Works Administration employed more than four million men and women at jobs from building and repairing roads and bridges, parks, playgrounds and public buildings to creating art. Unemployment, however, persisted at high levels. That led the administration to create a permanent jobs program, the Works Progress Administration. The W.P.A. began in 1935 and would last until 1943, employing 8.5 million people and spending $11 billion as it transformed the national infrastructure, made clothing for the poor, and created landmark programs in art, music, theater and writing. To accommodate unions that were growing stronger at the time, the W.P.A. at first paid building trades workers “prevailing wages” but shortened their hours so as not to compete with private employers.

Roosevelt’s efforts to assert government control over the economy were frustrated by Supreme Court rulings that overturned key pieces of legislation. In response, Roosevelt made the misstep of trying to “pack” the Supreme Court with additional justices. Congress rejected this 1937 proposal and turned against further New Deal measures, but not before the Social Security Act creating old-age pensions went into effect.

Brightening economic prospects were dashed in 1937 by a deep recession that lasted from that fall through most of 1938. The new downturn rolled back gains in industrial production and employment, prolonged the Depression and caused Roosevelt to increase the work relief rolls of the W.P.A. to their highest level ever.

Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 brought declarations of war from France and England, launching the Second World War.  Japan had invaded China two years earlier.  These escalating wars turned national attention to defense.  Roosevelt, who had been re-elected in 1936, sought to rebuild a military infrastructure that had been neglected after World War I.  Work on army camps and roads and airfields became a new focus of the WPA as private employment still lagged pre-depression levels.  But as the war in Europe intensified with France surrendering to Germany and England fighting on, ramped-up military production began to reduce the persistent unemployment that was the main face of the depression.  Jobless workers were absorbed as trainees for defense jobs and then by the draft that went into effect in 1940, when Roosevelt was elected to a third term.  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that brought the United States into World War II sent America’s factories into full production and absorbed all available workers. 

Despite the New Deal’s many measures and their alleviation of the worst effects of the Great Depression, it was the humming factories that supplied the American war effort that finally brought the Depression to a close. And it was not until 1954 that the stock market regained its pre-Depression levels.