Adescendant of the renowned Southern general Robert E. Lee, (Nelle) Harper Lee was born in 1926 to Frances Finch Lee and Amasa Coleman, a lawyer. She lived with her family in the small Alabama town of Monroeville. Later she studied law at the University of Alabama before pursuing a writing career. Her first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, became an instant bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961.
Agricultural and economic background. In To Kill a Mockingbird, the Finch family traces its heritage back to an ancestor who owned slaves and set up a modest cotton plantation in Alabama. This realistic if predictable fictional background reminds the reader that cotton had been an important Southern crop for many generations. By the time that the novel takes place, during the Great Depression, the cotton industry had suffered setbacks that affected both black and white residents throughout the South.
Overfarming of single crops, especially cotton, had exhausted the soil in many areas of the South. Widespread tenant farming only worsened the situation as farmers with short-term goals further exploited the land.
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