To Kill A Mockingbird

Things to Know

The Basics

• Written by Harper Lee in 1960.• Takes place in early 1930’s in Alabama• Told by Scout (girl), over the span of 3 years.• Told as an adult memory. (sort of flashback).• Contains main plot, several sub-plots.

Text Basics

• Story of growing up in a small town in Alabama, during the depression, as told by a 6 year old girl. Adult issues faced (racism, gender bias, education, poverty, race within race), woven within childhood memories.

Harper Lee basics

• Wrote the novel when she was 34 years old.• Semi-autobiographical• Only wrote 2 novels, most recent one

published the summer of 2015 (Go Set A Watchman).

• Won Pulitzer Prize for TKAM (the greatest, awesomest, bestest award a writer can win)…next to a Nobel Prize…

Mockingbird vs Bible?

• To Kill a Mockingbird might just be more popular than the Bible, Mary McDonagh Murphy suggests in the introductory chapter to her new book “Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird.” Murphy writes:

• Fifty years after its publication, it sells nearly a million copies every year—hundreds of thousands more than “The Catcher in the Rye,” “The Great Gatsby” or “Of Mice and Men,” American classics that are staples of high school classrooms. No other twentieth-century American novel is more widely read

Across the pond…

• Even British librarians, who were polled in 2006 and asked, “Which book should every adult read before they die?” voted “To Kill a Mockingbird” number one. The Bible was number two.

Murphy’s view on the Text:

• “Reading ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is something millions of us have in common,” Murphy writes, “and yet there is nothing common about the experience.”

What about Harper Lee?

• Harper Lee—that baffling, elusive figure who, after publishing exactly one best-selling, Pulitzer prize-winning, era-defining novel, politely refused to give us another.

• Lee hasn’t given any interviews since 1964

Harper Lee, according to her sister…

• Method of typing: Hunt and Peck, • Tumultuous friendship with Truman Capote

(“Truman became very jealous because Nelle Harper got a Pulitzer and he did not”)

• Reasons for not publishing after “Mockingbird” (she hadn’t

“anywhere to go but down)

Lee told Oprah…

• You know the character Boo Radley? If you know Boo, then you understand why I wouldn’t be doing an interview, because I really am Boo.

Go Set A Watchman

• Published 2015• Only other novel written• Has many critics (lacks unity, no clear

beginning, middle and end).• was actually written before TKAM, but was

lost (found by her lawyer 55 years after TKAM

Ageing Lee

• In 2013 Lee sued her former agent’s son claiming he tricked her into signing over her rights to TKAM.

• Sued her hometown museum (Monroe County Heritage Museum) for trademark infringement, claiming they used her fame to gain profits.

TKAM Pop Culture!

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Babies!

• Jennifer Love Hewitt and her husband, Brian Hallisay, welcomed son Atticus into the world June 14. Other celebrities who've named their sons Atticus are Jason Behr and KaDee Strickland (in 2013), Casey Affleck and Summer Phoenix (in 2008), and Daniel Baldwin (in 1996).

• Honorable mention: Jake Gyllenhaal's two dogs are a puggle named Boo Radley and Atticus Finch, a rescued German Shepherd.

Clothes

• Out of Print clothing has T-shirts and pendants taken from the book while unofficial T-shirts from Atticus Finch‘s fictional law firm are available online.

Babies love TKAM!

• Blink-182 members Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge are two of the founders of Atticus Clothing Company. The streetwear company uses a dead bird as a logo.

Tattoos

Comics