Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird Calls for Social Justice

Date July 11, 1960

Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, a moving plea for social justice, was a popular and critical success, winning a Pulitzer Prize for the author and an Academy Award for the star of the film version of the book. The book remains in print and is considered one of the best American novels of the twentieth century.

Locale United States

Key Figures

• Harper Lee (1926–2016), American novelist
• Truman Capote (Truman Streckfus Persons; 1924-1984), American writer and Lee’s lifelong friend
• Gregory Peck (1916-2003), American actor who portrayed Atticus Finch in the film adapted from the novel

Summary of Event

Harper Lee's novel of social injustice, To Kill a Mockingbird, exposed the racism and prejudices of a fictional small southern town much like the one in which Lee grew up. Lee, however, did not intend the book to be a complete rejection of her southern heritage. Her mother, Frances Finch Lee, came from a distinguished Virginia family that founded the town of Finchburg, Alabama. Harper paid tribute to that side of her family by calling her fictional hero “Atticus Finch.”

Atticus was modeled on Harper’s father Amasa Coleman (A. C.) Lee, a principled individual like his ancestor Robert E. Lee, the revered Confederate general. A. C. was a community leader, a lawyer, a member of the state legislature, and part owner and editor of the local newspaper. Lee’s independence of mind is reflected not only in her father’s willingness to take unpopular cases but also in the fact that, at a time when women were not expected to enter the professions, he sent two daughters to law school. One of them, Alice, eventually became her father’s partner. However, Harper chose her own way to influence others; in 1950, six months before she would have received her law degree, she left the University of Alabama and went to New York City to become a writer.

Lee had been writing since she was seven, and later some of her work appeared in campus publications. In New York City, however, she was just another would-be author, supporting herself by working as an airline reservations clerk. After completing two essays and three short stories, Lee took the manuscripts to a literary agent, who suggested that she develop one of the stories into a novel. At that point, a group of friends offered Lee enough money so that she could quit her job and spend all her time writing. Even after her father’s illness made it necessary for her to divide her time between New York and Monroeville, Lee kept working on the novel, and, in 1957, she submitted the manuscript to an editor at J. B. Lippincott, only to be told to revise her work to make it more unified. To Kill a Mockingbird was finally published on July 11, 1960. Lee was soon to become part of a group of southern writers who were becoming increasingly important in the literary world.

To Kill a Mockingbird is set in the middle 1930s, long before the Civil Rights movement. It recaptures the Monroeville of the author’s own childhood, when she was a tomboy like the character of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch. Lee had spent much of her time growing up with a boy named Truman Streckfus Persons (Truman Capote), who would become Charles Baker “Dill” Harris in the novel.

Scout, the novel’s narrator, is a young person who, along with her brother Jem and her friend Dill, learn from Scout’s father that no matter what others say, every human being has value. In addition to being a book about racial injustice, in which an innocent African American man, Tom Robinson, is accused of and found guilty of raping a white girl, the novel also tells the story of Arthur “Boo” Radley, branded a monster by the community. Boo is befriended by the children and proves his worth by saving Jem’s life. Jem learns just how deceptive appearances can be when, forced by his father to read to an ill-tempered old lady, he discovers that she is bravely battling addiction to morphine.

Scout emulates her father’s courage by facing down a lynch mob. Throughout the novel, she also emulates his independence of mind by refusing to adopt the mannerisms of a southern lady, thus defying the gender role her aunt is determined to force on her. Eventually, Scout learns to differentiate between consideration for others—of the kind her father practices—and mindless affectation. After the book appeared, A. C. Lee voiced pride in his daughter’s work. He saw in the novel his own life story, that of a southern liberal who for years had spoken out for social justice, like many southern liberals of the time. Though A. C. had never defended an African American man in a rape case, he rightly saw himself in the character of Atticus Finch.

Initially, To Kill a Mockingbird’s critical reception was mixed. Though some found the novel deeply moving, others objected to what they called sermonizing and a melodramatic ending. Nevertheless, in 1961, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it sold 2.5 million copies in its first year. It became a Literary Guild selection, a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate, and a Reader’s Digest condensed book. The film To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) won an Academy Award for Horton Foote’s adapted screenplay and a Best Actor Oscar for Gregory Peck, who played Atticus Finch. Peck had his own production company make the film, because the major studios rejected it as too controversial.

Significance

Although at one time Harper Lee said that she was working on another novel with a southern setting, it evidently was not completed. Lee continued to divide her time between New York City and Monroeville. She lived quietly, rarely making public appearances or giving interviews. In 1983, she presented a paper, “Romance and High Adventure,” for the Alabama History and Heritage Festival. The paper appeared two years later in a collected work edited by Jerry E. Brown called Clearings in the Thicket: An Alabama Humanities Reader. Lee’s reputation, though, rests primarily on To Kill a Mockingbird and its sequel published in 2015, Go Set a Watchman.

By the 1970s, unfavorable criticism of To Kill a Mockingbird had virtually vanished. The novel was no longer considered too preachy or too melodramatic. In fact, during the Civil Rights era, the novel was studied as a classic example of race prejudice in the South. By the 1990s, however, scholars revisiting the book began to see it in a broader perspective. Although the novel was clearly a work against racism, gender was a major theme as well.

Critical reinterpretations of Lee’s novel, along with its enduring appeal to general readers, have made To Kill A Mockingbird a classic work in American literature. It remains in print, has been translated into many foreign languages, and is a standard text in American high schools and colleges. With its plea for tolerance and understanding, To Kill a Mockingbird has undoubtedly left its mark on a changing culture. Indeed, in 2003, the American Film Institute named Atticus Finch, as portrayed by Peck, the greatest hero in the history of American cinema.

In 2015, in a still mysterious turn of events, HarperCollins published what it publicized as a new novel set in the world of To Kill a Mockingbird—the original manuscript that Lee had submitted to editors in the 1950s—that she had just decided to publish. Titled Go Set a Watchman, the story involves many of the same characters and is set approximately twenty years after the events of the classic as Jean Louise travels home to visit her ageing father. While the book became an instant best seller, its publication had also become shrouded in controversy. Questions arose as to whether Lee had really had any involvement in deciding to publish the manuscript, especially given her frail state following a stroke and the death of her sister, Alice, who had served as her longtime guardian. Along with this aspect, many readers became immediately disheartened and even angered by the fact that the character of Atticus Finch is portrayed as a racist, a twist that a number of critics and readers alike feel severely detracts from the heroic legacy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Meanwhile, others argued that Watchman instead offers a more real version of the beloved character that is suitable to the modern race struggles faced by the nation. Lee stayed silent until her death in February 2016.

Bibliography

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Alter, Alexandra. "While Some Are Shocked by Go Set a Watchman, Others Find Nuance in a Bigoted Atticus Finch." New York Times. New York Times, 11 July 2015. Web. 2 Sept. 2015.

Going, William T. Essays on Alabama Literature. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1975. Print.

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Johnson, Claudia Durst. To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries. New York: Twayne, 1994. Print.

Johnson, Claudia Durst. Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historic Documents. Westport: Greenwood, 1994. Print.

Shackelford, Dean. “The Female Voice in To Kill a Mockingbird: Narrative Strategies in Film and Novel.” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures 50 (1996–7): 101–13. Print.

Shields, Charles J. Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. New York: Holt, 2006. Print.