Friday, July 25, 2014

Backwards background

Since I didn't post any background information before reading To Kill a Mockingbird, I'm doing things a little backwards and posting it afterwards.  You might already have read some of this from Andrew's blog post, but hopefully you'll learn something new.

The reason I chose To Kill a Mockingbird for my sort of free reading book is because several people had recommended it to me and had even gone as far to call it one of their favorite books.  Eager to find out what was so enchanting about this book, I put it on my reading list and proceeded not to get around to reading it for about a year.  Not that I wanted to read it, or even had forgotten about it, I just got distracted by other books.  It seems that having To Kill a Mockingbird on the summer reading list was the perfect thing to push me to finally read it.

Nelle Harper Lee was born April 28, 1926 in Monroe, Alabama, and is known for her first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.  It was a huge success, winning the Pulitzer Prize and becoming an American classic.  Growing up, Lee was good friends with a boy named Truman Capote, who also later became an author, and defended him from those who picked on him.  Like Scout, she was raised in a small Alabama town with a lawyer for a father.  Some say that Mockingbird is loosely based on her own childhood.  During her college years, Lee wrote for the school magazine, was an exchange student at Oxford, and started law school.  After dropping out of law school, she moved to New York to pursue her dreams of being a writer.  It was during this time that she published Mockingbird.  Later, Harper Lee assisted her friend Truman Capote in writing In Cold Blood, a work of non-fiction.  She also worked on another novel that she never published.  Now aged 88, Lee tends to stay away from the spotlight or anything related to her book, though she just recently allowed it to be made into an e-book.

"Nelle Harper Lee." Bio. A&E Television Networks, 2014. Web. 25 July 2014.        

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