In 1963, the film was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won three: Gregory Peck for best actor Horton Foote for best screenplay and Henry Bumstead for best art direction. Renowned playwright Horton Foote wrote the screenplay, and Elmer Bernstein composed the memorable musical score. In 1962, Universal Pictures released a film adaptation featuring Gregory Peck in the starring role, Robert Duvall as Boo Radley, and Birmingham natives Mary Badham as Scout and Philip Alford as Jem. The case is hopeless from the beginning despite Finch’s best efforts, and it exposes him and his family to the anger and ostracism of Maycomb’s white people, violent retribution by Bob Ewell, and the admiration of the town’s black population. The hero of the story is Scout’s lawyer father, Atticus Finch, who agrees to defend Tom Robinson. She learns the same lessons about the middle-class white residents of Maycomb and about the poor but proud Cunningham family and the poor but not-very-proud Ewells. She also discovers that the black members of her town are complex people, some ignorant and evil and others wise and good. Essentially a coming-of-age novel about lost innocence, Scout learns that her otherwise decent and fair-minded white neighbors ignore the evidence when judging a black man accused of a violent crime. She is six when the novel begins and nine when it ends. Jean Louise narrates the story from adulthood as a reminiscence of her childhood. The plot is simple: three young children-Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, her older brother, Jem, and their friend, Dill-spend their summer holidays trying to learn more about their reclusive neighbor Arthur “Boo” Radley and soon become caught up in the unfolding drama of the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a poor white man, Robert E. The novel is set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, (loosely based on Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Monroe County) between the summer of 1932 and Halloween night of 1935, during the Great Depression when many blacks and whites shared a common poverty. Lee did so, and the result, To Kill A Mockingbird, was published in 1960 to critical acclaim and public enthusiasm, winning the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her editor at Lippincott Publishers, Tay Hohoff, convinced her to pull out the flashbacks of Scout’s youth and refocus the novel around them. She originally conceived it as a novel focusing on main character Jean Louise “Scout” Finch as an adult returning to Maycomb for a summer visit and confronting the racial realities of her hometown in response to the civil rights movement it was to be titled Go Set a Watchman. Lee began work on what would become the novel in 1956 while living in New York City. The story told in the novel parallels two court cases that took place in Alabama but was not based directly on them: The Scottsboro Trials of 1931, in which nine black youths were tried for allegedly raping two white women on a train in north Alabama and a November 1933 incident in Monroeville in which Naomi Lowery, a poor white woman, alleged that Walter Lett, a black ex-convict, sexually assaulted her. The themes and issues raised in the novel remain relevant, and thus To Kill A Mockingbird will likely hold its place in public discourse on tolerance, justice, and humanity. It continues to sell around a million copies a year and is often ranked among the world’s best-sellers. The Pulitzer Prize–winning novel spent 88 weeks on bestseller lists, and by the 50th anniversary of its publication in 2010 had sold some 40 million copies. The moral voice in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is embodied by Atticus Finch is unique in the novel because he understands people without loosing faith when evil occurs.Ītticus accepts people for what they are good and bad qualities included.Ītticus accepts these points and tries to see life through other people’s eyes.Ītticus can admire Mrs Dubose’ s courage whilst in deplores her racism.By almost any measurement, Harper Lee‘s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) is the most important novel ever authored by a native Alabamian. Scout is able to sustain her faith in human nature. These themes show how innocent people can be betrayed by ignorance.Įven Jem is victimized to an extent by his discovery of the evil of racism during and after the trial. The novel explores this idea through using Scout and Jem movement from childhood innocence to mature understanding adults.Īs a result of this transition from innocence to experience, one of the important themes involves threat, hatred, prejudice, racism and ignorance. It is a exploration of whether people are essentially good or essentially evil. The main theme in the novel is the exploration of moral nature of humans.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |