General Questions about TKM Context

Questions:


1. What is the cultural and educational background of the author?
2. What are the values and aesthetic concerns of the culture of the author (literature movement, cultural movement, society of that time, etc)?
3. What important social, political or economic issues took place in the author's times.


Answers:


1. Born in 1926, Harper Lee grew up in the Southern town of Monroeville, Alabama (very similar to Maycomb in the novel). She attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery (1944–45), and then studied law at the University of Alabama (1945–49). While attending college, she wrote for campus literary magazines: Huntress at Huntingdon and the humor magazine Rammer Jammer at the University of Alabama. At both colleges, she wrote short stories and other works about racial injustice, a rarely mentioned topic on such campuses at the time.


2. The Author was raised at the time of Jim Crows's laws, these laws where based on racism and slavery, so society at that time was very racist (Ku Klux Klan for example), specially in the south of USA because of the big majority of white people. Also she experienced a lot of conflicts during her 
childhood, such as the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression 
and the World War II.




3. In 1931, when Lee was five, nine young black men were accused of raping two white women near Scottsboro, Alabama. After a series of lengthy, highly publicized, and often bitter trials, five of the nine men were sentenced to long prison terms. Many prominent lawyers and other American citizens saw the sentences as spurious and motivated only by racial prejudice, also, she confronted the Great Depression so she sawed and experienced poverty around her childhood.