Harper Lee, an American author known for writing a multitude of different novels such as “Go set a watchman”, “The emperor's cool clothes” and my personal favorite, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” was born on April 28, 1926 her father was an attorney and she had an older brother as well. As a child, Harper was absolutely in love with reading so I guess that explains her choice of career. In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird Harper reveals how her father Atticus, and her older brother Jem play a major role in her life, although To Kill a Mockingbird wasn’t by any means supposed to be an autobiography Harper Lee did use certain individuals from her childhood. For example, Dill was really just another version of her neighbor growing up. When Harper Lee was five years old the Scottsboro Boys Trial was going on, this inspired her to include the Tom Robinson Trial in the novel. Harper saw all these things going on when she was growing up she used writing as her escape.
Growing up in the 1930s when the Great Depression was going on racial injustice/prejudice was beginning to take off yet again, at this point Harper is only five, so she doesn’t know how to handle her father defending an African American man in court especially when black people were frowned upon. It wasn't until 1932 that 50% of black people were out of work due to white people pushing for African Americans to be unemployed simply because white Americans were out of jobs, The Great Depression was clearly one of the world's biggest disasters because 30% of people were unemployed by 1933. Harper Lee didn’t have much of an education other than going to a grammar school, however, she did attempt to get her college degree from the University of Alabama in 1949. She was going to be a lawyer like her father but ended up leaving college early before she could even get her degree.
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In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird there are many major themes, but a major one is Youth. Scout and Jem represent youth because they’re super young kids with a lot going on and their lack of understanding certain topics probably wouldn’t be there if they were much older. Scout shows her youth by being very inquisitive, she questions anything and everything, for example in chapter 9 Scout asks “what’s a whore-lady?” and later in chapter 14 “What’s rape?” these are not things the average 6 or 7 year old child should be asking. In this novel, Atticus has very different roles he plays in both Jem and Scout’s life. He has to try his hardest to keep Scout out of trouble and for Jem it's almost the opposite, Jem has a very playful side of him but he’s a little more mature than his sister Atticus spends a lot of time teaching him life lessons that he doesn’t quite understand at first because he's still so young.
In Harper Lee’s famous Go Set a Watchman, written 20 years after To Kill a Mockingbird she touches on racial injustice as well as women’s roles in society. In fact, some major themes of this particular writing I would say are race and gender. For example, prior to World War 2 women’s duties were to stay home, cook, clean, and take care of the kids while men went out and worked, however, once all the men went to fight in the war women had to take over these jobs. Unfortunately, after the war was over men got their jobs back and then women went back to their role in the house which had them infuriated, these are the things Harper was touching on in her novel. In chapter 1 Henry makes a bold statement showing us how women were really looked at. “As a general rule most women, before they’ve got’em, present their men smiling, agreeing faces.” Later in Chapter 16 Jeans’s having a discussion about marriage and says “is that what loving your man is? You mean losing your identity, don't you”. Jean was still a little tomboy on the inside and now we see how she feels about the role women played during this time period.
All of Harper Lee’s time wasn’t always spent writing about racial injustice and things of that nature, she’s written books that are supposed to be funny but every time there was a lesson to be learned. For example in the novel Emperor’s Cool Clothes Harper was trying to tell the audience that you don’t always have to be the coolest, you don’t always have to have the nicest of threads, when given a lot of power use it for the greater good, and last but not least, be careful who you have around you. The emperor hired people to work for him and make his clothes so he would look the best, these clothes were supposed to be invisible to those who were stupid and incompetent. The emperor cannot see the clothes but doesn’t want to admit it out of fear so instead, he puts on the clothes, then marches in front of his people just to later be called out by a child. All the emperor cared about was being the best looking and instead of being truthful with the tailor he kept his mouth shut. The people that were making his clothes turned out to be con-men, they didn’t care about the king or putting effort into anything all they wanted was money, and in the end, they made the emperor look silly. The emperor never used his power for the benefit of others, only for himself. For instance, the people argued and disagreed with him but he felt like they shouldn't be questioning anything he does. “Why does everyone argue with me? I'm the Emperor!” The emperor was just arrogant and Harper wanted to show that there’s no reason for people to be acting like that.
Harper Lee was an author from a time period that people called “Southern Gothic”. To Kill a Mockingbird first came out in the year of 1960, this was a time period when writing was becoming popular. So much was going on during the ’60s, for example, the Vietnam War. The assassinations of JFK, MLK, and later Neil Armstrong was the first human to ever land on the moon. As people were losing loved ones battling adversity, and dealing with the harsh realities of life they resulted to writing in a multitude of different styles, whatever it took to take their minds off things. So all in all with everything Harper experienced, it’s made it easy to conclude that she may have done with a few purposes in mind, to inspire, to teach, to inform, and to entertain. Harper wanted to inform the people of her struggle, the things she witnessed and how she grew up. In every novel Harper wrote, she included people and things from her real life, this was her escape. In her whole career, she only published two books herself and they were dealing with racial injustice, and women inequality. She wants to teach the audience that no matter what color or gender you are that you are still equal and deserve to be treated right. Obviously, the goal when writing a book is to entertain the audience but it seemed as if Harper Lee wasn’t too worried about that all she wanted to do was speak about real-life events and help make the world better, and she did that, all just by writing. So for that Harper Lee is one of the most talented and influential writers to ever live.
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