To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill A Mockingbird is a novel about bildungsroman (coming of age) and the Civil Rights Movement, written by Harper Lee.   The book is set in Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s.   Atticus Finch, a lawyer and a father, defends a black man, Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a poor white girl, Mayella Ewell (Siminoff, 2011).
Harper Lee is an American writer, famous for her race relations novel To Kill a Mockingbird.   Descendent from Robert E. Lee, the Southern Civil War general, Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama.   Lee studied law at the University of Alabama from 1945 to 1949, and spent a year as an exchange student in Oxford University, Wellington Square.   Six months before finishing her studies, she went to New York to pursue a literary career.   She worked as an Airline reservation clerk with Eastern Airlines and British Overseas Airways during the 1950s.   In 1959 Lee accompanied Truman Capote to Holcombe, Kansas, as a research assistant for Capote’s classic ‘non-fiction’ novel In Cold Blood (Harper Lee).
This novel fits with other literature of that genre because the story was set in the southern United States during a time when racial discrimination was legal and culturally accepted.   In society, there are few things worse than a social stigma or stereotype.   Such things are unfair, to everyone involved.   However, social stigma and stereotypes are not a recent trend.   These have been present in America and everyday life for a very long time.   To Kill a Mockingbird captures stereotypes and stigmas providing a remarkable description of a self-defeating culture frozen in its own prejudice, faced in everyday life in Maycomb County.   Maycomb was a “tired old town” precisely because it was dominated by stereotypes and prejudice formed in its early slavery days.   However, the stereotype of “family” assumes the biggest role in society.   The family “name” takes on a stereotypical meaning in Maycomb county and influences society’s view of the characters.   In...