We later find out that he has been forced to stay at home by his father after he committed a minor crime, which brought shame to his family. Tom Robinson, a black man is charged with raping a white woman, Mayelle Ewell, and Atticus Finch is appointed his lawyer. At one point there is an attempt to lynch Robinson, but this is averted after an intervention by Scout. Atticus defends Tom, and he does it skillfully and he appears to prove that his client is innocent and Mayelle is a liar.
However, the all-white jury convicts Tom, even though it is clear that they do not believe the allegations against him. Later, while in prison, Tom is shot while allegedly trying to escape. One night he sees Jem and Scout and in a fury, he attacks them with a knife. During the attack, the arm of Jem is broken, then the children are saved by an unlikely hero, that is Boo Radley.
He fights with Ewell and manages to take his knife from him and kills him. Sheriff Heck Tate arrives, and he decides that it was a case of self-defense and declares that the attacker had killed himself when he tripped and fell on his own knife. This was done to protect the privacy of Boo and to ensure that he did not get into legal trouble.
The novel ends with Scout watching Boo, who returns to his house and is never seen again [3]. It captures very well the parochial and insular nature of a small town in the South in the post-war period.
The author captures the social milieu very well. Towns like Monroeville were very hierarchical, and people were defined by their class. In particular, Lee captures the pervasive racism that was pervasive in the South in the s. At this time, African-Americans while officially and legally equal had fewer rights than whites. The injustice perpetrated on Tom Robinson was not uncommon and many African-Americans lived under the threat of racial violence, as he had.
Robinson is shown to be a hardworking and honest man who has been unjustly accused of a crime. Harper Lee never stated who was the model for Robinson and his trial.
One of the possible models was the case of William Lett from Alabama in , who was imprisoned for sexually assaulting a white female and who later died in prison. Another person who may have been the model for Robinson was Emmett Till, who lynched after allegedly insulting a white woman [4].
Many assume that the book refers to the notorious case of the Scottsboro boys, they were a group of African American youths, who were wrongly convicted of rape and sentenced to death. It seems likely that the Robinson character and his fate was based on the numerous examples of racial injustice that was the norm in America before the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement [5].
Perhaps one of the most remarkable characters in the book is Boo Radley, the recluse. In the movie he is played by the young Robert Duval, then an unknown actor. Boo Radley is a symbol of the dehumanization that was so common in the socially and racially repressive America of the time.
In the novel he becomes the unlikely hero when he saves Scout and Jem [6]. It appears that Lee based this character on a neighboring family.
When she was growing up in the s, there was a family who lived in a boarded-up house, similar to the one described in the book. In the book, Boo Radley is a recluse who leaves presents for the children in a tree. We used to go and get those things out of the trees. Everything [Lee] wrote about it is absolutely true. Lee wrote Go Set A Watchman in the s. Set 20 years after To Kill a Mockingbird , it contains many of the same characters and themes. Lee then started To Kill a Mockingbird.
After withdrawing from law school, Lee moved to New York and worked as an airline reservationist. One Christmas, her friends Joy and Michael Brown gave her a gift : enough money to write for one year. I would do my best not to fail them.
Finally, the publisher Lippincott accepted the manuscript, even though it needed a lot of work. It was published in I didn't expect the book to sell in the first place. Not only was it a best-seller, it was followed up with an Oscar-winning movie starring Gregory Peck.
It also won a Pulitzer Prize in The letters from Harper Lee now housed at Emory University place the writer at home in Alabama during this crucial year of civil rights protests. But despite her own alienation, Lee also continues to defend her home, the South, from those in the North who would see it only as the land of the Klan. In the final letter in the new collection, written on Nov. This was an axiomatic impossibility, according to Esquire! And, of course, as Jean Louise discovers that, Harper Lee intends for the reader to discover that.
Bush in
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