Harper Lee in To Kill a Mocking Bird

Nelle Harper Lee is a novelist of American descent, popular for her novel To Kill a
Mocking Bird. To Kill a Mocking Bird revolves around the awakening of Scout, a young girl,
about the presence of prejudice and racism in her town. A black resident is falsely accused of
committing a crime against a white woman. Atticus Finch, Scout’s father, offers to defend the
young man. The book is inspired by Harper Lee’s personal life experiences as a young girl
growing up in Alabama. The book is based on a case where Lee’s father, a lawyer, offered to
defend two African American men who had been accused of killing a white storekeeper. There is
a striking similarity between Harper Lee, the author, and Scout, the narrator in the novel.
Scout is a reflection of Harper Lee in many ways. First, the two have personalities that
mirror each other. Harper Lee “did not wear an ounce of makeup, only brushed her hair instead
of curling it” (Shields, 2015). She did not have an interest in beauty regimens but instead spent
most of her time reading. She would even skip evening dinners to avoid being forced to wear an
evening dress. She thus grew like Scout. He, too, was never interested in clothes. Additionally,
both Scout and Lee grew up during an era when racism was rampant. The blacks were
discriminated against by the whites. Sulllivan (1960) notes that the novel is an accurate
description of life in the 30s in a small southern town. Her experiences seem to have
significantly shaped her fictional writing. She recreated her life through the character of Scout
and then recounted her past experiences as a young girl growing up in Alabama.
The novel is based on a social and racial ideology that characterized the civil rights era.
Notes that the Emmett Till trial of 1955 “provided a workable model for aspects of Lee’s
fictional Tom Robinson trial” (Chura, 2000). The Civil rights era had an influence on Harper

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Lee. She saw how black people were treated and were in disapproval. She thus wrote a novel that
mirrored her encounters so that society could know the evils of racial discrimination. In the
novel, she writes that mockingbirds play a good role in society as they sing songs for people to
listen to. She thus alludes that it is not right to kill them (Lee, 2010).  She recounts the social
conditions of the civil era. She even recounts a time when an African American woman declined
to offer her seat in a bus to a white passenger. She writes in admiration of the woman’s courage.
The central issues in Harper’s lee’s fictional book hint at a conflicting historical
periodicity. Early in the novel, she notes that there are issues that they could only talk about after
years had passed (Lee, 2010). Thus, time is important in the writing of the novel. In the
biography, it is evident that Harper Lee took time to decide on the better point of view to use in
the novel (Shields, 2015). After three drafts, she decided to combine both the third person and
the first person, and the narrators live in the “present” of the novel, and they also look back. This
enables her to reflect back on her youth and narrate what she encountered in Alabama. Overall,
the two points of view enable the author to seamlessly merge her encounters living in Alabama
with her fictional creations.

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References

Chura, P. (2000). Prolepsis and Anachronism: Emmet Till and the Historicity of To Kill a
Mockingbird. The Southern Literary Journal, 32(2), 1-26.
Lee, H. (2010). To Kill a Mockingbird. Random House.
Shields, C. J. (2015). I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee. Square Fish.
Sullivan, R. (1960). Engrossing First Novel of Rare Excellence. Chicago Tribune, 17.