Harper Lee's Life
Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, which was a small town about halfway between Montgomery and Mobile. Her next-door neighbor and best friend was Truman Capote. Her father, like Atticus, was also a lawyer. Her father served in the Alabama legislature from 1927 to 1939. He was a staunch segregationist until the late 1950s, when the increasing civil rights protests caught his attention.
Father: Amasa Coleman Lee
Mother: Frances Cunningham Lee
Sister: Alice Lee
Sister: Louise Lee
Brother: Edwin Coleman Lee
Father: Amasa Coleman Lee
Mother: Frances Cunningham Lee
Sister: Alice Lee
Sister: Louise Lee
Brother: Edwin Coleman Lee
Her Career Begins
Lee attended three colleges and studied law but she received no degrees. By the 1950s she was working as an airline reservations clerk. She wrote in her free time, until she received an amazing Christmas present from friends. It was a year's wages, without having to work. She said that they could not afford such generosity.
The Interview
During an interview, Lee said: “I simply want to do the best I can with the talent that God gave me, I suppose. I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly. And that is small town middle-class southern life. There is something universal in it. There’s something decent to be said for it and there’s something to lament when it goes, in its passing. In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of Southern Alabama”. From this, i assume that Harper Lee is in-between the higher and lower classes.
Why Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird during a very uptight time racially in her home state of Alabama. The South was still forcing black people to use separate facilities apart from those used by white people, in almost every portion of society. The Civil Rights Movement began to pick up steam when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. Marin Luther King, Jr. became the leader of the movement, and the problem began to gain a lot national attention. This was clearly a prime subject of To Kill a Mockingbird, specifically the inequality of racism and inequality in the South of America, was highly related at the time of its publication.