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What Is Lee's Childhood In To Kill A Mockingbird

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What Is Lee's Childhood In To Kill A Mockingbird
Harper Lee’s life connects her childhood to Scout Finch’s childhood. Lee wanted to use something authentic for a child’s life in the book. She wanted to make To Kill A Mockingbird, as close to the real time period it takes after, which was the Great Depression. Lee wanted to make the novel powerful in it’s own way. Harper Lee was the youngest child of her parents’ four children. She had two sisters and a brother. Lee was thirty-one years old when she first gave a publisher the manuscript to what was going to be known as To Kill A Mockingbird, but the publisher turned it down, telling her that she needed to work on it. For two and a half years, she rewrote the manuscript to meet the publisher’s needs. Later on, after the book became famous, …show more content…
Her mother, Frances Cunningham Finch Lee, was the inspiration for two families’ last names, the Cunninghams and the Finches. The setting, Maycomb County, was loosely based around the town Lee grew up in, Monroeville, Alabama. Some of the activities that Scout and Jem do, like going down to Boo Radley’s house (Lee, 71), was something that Lee would do with her siblings. Her father, Amasa Lee, was a lawyer who defended a black man being accused of rape, like Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson (Lee, 227). After, she had some connection to the Civil Rights movement. Harper Lee was trying to make social statements with To Kill A Mockingbird. One of those statements was that black people should be treated with the same respect as white people. Lee’s book had an impact on the American culture later in the years. To Kill A Mockingbird told white people that they should treat black people like their brothers. To Kill A Mockingbird shows how Harper Lee and her family lived with she was a child. Many things that Scout did, Lee did. Scout learned that all people were equal and that her father would defend anyone because he was that type of person. Harper Lee learned the same lesson when her father defended a black man accused of rape. Scout learns that she has to walk around in other people’s shoes, or skin, before judging the other

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