To Kill a Mockingbird

1. To Kill a Mockingbird

2. Best Novel of the Twentieth Century • First published in 1960 • Bestseller in 1960 • Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 • Sold over 30 million copies • Selected as best novel of the Twentieth Century – 1999 Library Journal • Translated into over 40 languages

3. Harper Lee • President Johnson named Lee to the National Council of Arts in June 1966. • She has published only a few short essays in popular magazines since her literary debut. • To Kill a Mockingbird was her only novel until the release of Go Set a Watchman. • Read my take on Watchman on Socrates Underground.

4. Parts of the novel are clearly autobiographical. • Lee grew up in Alabama. • Lee’s father was an attorney. • Scout’s friend Dill is assumed to have based on Lee’s neighbor and childhood friend, Truman Capote. • Boo Radley is based on a man who lived in Lee’s neighborhood.

5. The Movie • In 1962, the novel was made into a movie. • This movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture. • Gregory Peck, who played Atticus, won an Oscar for Best Actor. • Lee loved the film. She said, “If the integrity of a film adaptation of a novel can be measured by the degree to which the novelist's intent is preserved, this screenplay should be studied as a classic.”

6. Gregory Peck with Brock Peters as Atticus and Tom Robinson in the courtroom. Gregory Peck with Philip Alford and Mary Badham as Atticus, Jem and Scout

7. The Great Depression

8. On Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed, triggering the Great Depression, the worst economic collapse in the history of the modern industrial world. It spread from the United States to the rest of the world, lasting from the end of 1929 until the early 1940s. Photo by Dorothea Lange

9. This period was the longest and worst period of high unemployment and low business activity in modern times. Banks, stores, and factories were closed, leaving millions of Americans jobless, homeless, and penniless. Many people came to depend on the government or charity to provide them with food. • By 1932, one of every four workers was unemployed. Banks failed and life savings were lost, leaving many Americans destitute. With no job and no savings, thousands of Americans lost their homes. The poor congregated in cardboard shacks in Hoovervilles, so called after President Hoover as an insult, on the edges of cities • Wage income for workers who were lucky enough to have kept their jobs fell almost 43% between 1929 and 1933.

10. The Dust Bowl • Complicating the fall of Wall Street was a severe drought which hit first in the eastern part of the country in 1930. In 1931, it moved toward the west. • By 1934 it had turned the Great Plains into a desert. • Dry land farming on the Great Plains led to the systematic destruction of the prairie grasses. In the ranching regions, overgrazing also destroyed large areas of grassland. Gradually, the land was laid bare.

11. The Dust Bowl • With the onset of drought in 1930, over-farmed and over-grazed land began to blow away. Strong winds across the plains raised billowing clouds of dust. The sky could darken for days. In some places, the dust drifted like snow, covering farm buildings and houses. Nineteen states in the heartland of the United States became a vast dust bowl. With no chance of making a living, farm families abandoned their homes and land, fleeing westward to become migrant laborers. • The Drought alone did not cause the black blizzards. Dry spells occurred roughly every 25 years; it was the combination of drought and misuse of the land that led to the incredible devastation of the Dust Bowl years. Originally covered with grasses that held the fine soil in place, the land was plowed by settlers when they homesteaded the area. Wheat crops, in high demand during World War I, exhausted the topsoil.

12. The Dust Bowl got its name after Black Sunday, April 14, 1935. By 1934, it was estimated that 100 million acres of farmland had lost all or most of the topsoil to the winds. By April 1935, there had been weeks of dust storms, but the cloud that appeared on the horizon that Sunday was the worst. Winds were clocked at 60 mph.

13. The Okies • Farmers were forced to abandon their land. • Some went to cities, but many decided to head west. In fact, during the 30s hundreds of thousands left the plains for the West Coast. So many migrated from Oklahoma that they were dubbed "Okies" in the popular press. The boosters of California had advertised that the state offered a perfect climate and an abundance of work in the agricultural industry. • Florence Thompson (left) says she was one of the Okies. She and her family had left Oklahoma in 1925, before the Depression. The 30s made their situation worse. She and the family were following the migrant trail moving from place to place as crops became ready for harvest. • "It was very hard and cheap," Florence said. "We just existed! We survived, let's put it that way." • California – the state that had once advertised for more migrant workers – found themselves overwhelmed by up to 7,000 new migrants a month, more migrants than they needed. So for several months in 1936, the Los Angeles Police Department sent 136 deputies to the state lines to turn back migrants who didn't have any money. “Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange

14. The New Deal The New Deal was the title President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave to the series of programs he initiated between 1933 and 1938 with the goal of providing relief, recovery, and reform (3 Rs) to the people and economy of the United States during the Great Depression. Based on the assumption that the power of the federal government was needed to get the country out of the depression, the first days of Roosevelt's administration saw the passage of banking reform laws, emergency relief programs, work relief programs, and agricultural programs. Later, a second New Deal was to evolve; it included union protection programs, the Social Security Act, and programs to aid tenant farmers and migrant workers.

15. Tennessee Valley Authority Douglas Dam was part of the New Deal.

16. What do these pictures make you think of from the book? a well-to-do family during the Depression a town in Alabama during the Depression era.

17. society ladies walking downtown

18. Condemned housing that poor Blacks still occupy A school during the Depression era

19. a poor white woman living in a shack typical poor White housing a house near the town dump in Alabama during the Depression era All historical photos courtesy of the National Photographic Archives Online http://www.archives.gov/

20. Themes in To Kill a Mockingbird • Loss of Innocence/ Coming of Age • Good versus Evil • Hypocrisy • Societal versus Personal Responsibility • Conformity • Stereotyping

21. Which theme is related to the Biblical story pictured here?

22. Loss of Innocence • Dates back to the story of Adam and Eve • Defines innocence as lack of knowledge of evil • With understanding comes responsibility • Boo Radley • Who loses innocence in the novel?

23. Which theme do you think this picture represents?

24. Good versus Evil • What is necessary in order to classify a character as evil? • Who in the novel represents each of these? • Is Mayella Ewell evil? Decide as you read. • Does Arthur Radley’s attack on his father make him evil?

25. Which theme does this picture illustrate?

26. Social Conformity • Peer Pressure • How does one decide how much to conform? • Who in the town of Maycomb conforms and to what extent?

27. Stereotyping and Hypocrisy • Stereotyping is applying the qualities of a few members of a group to the group as a whole. • Which groups are stereotyped in the novel? • Hypocrisy is when a person states a belief something but behaves in a manner that contradicts that belief. • Who is hypocritical in the novel?

28. Societal vs. Personal Responsibility • What does society expect of Atticus? • How does Atticus respond to these expectations? • How is this conflict resolved? • Who else defies societal expectations?