50 years on, To Kill a Mockingbird is still one of the most influential books people read. The Independent takes a look at the life and afterlife of Harper Lee's classic.
From the piece...
Harper Lee was well aware of the generic range of Southern literature – the plantation and sentimental novel (Alabama's Augusta Evans Wilson's Beulah and St Elmo), the Gothic (Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and the sensational (Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road) – and she claimed all she wanted to be was "the Jane Austen of South Alabama", focusing on "small-town middle-class southern life". This is ironic or disingenuous, and Mockingbird is no Southern version of Little House on the Prairie. Indeed, the novel defines itself within or against Southern genres, playing with readers' expectations and alluding to the many class, race and gender hypocrisies, inequalities and cruelties of small-town American life.
Although set 30 years earlier than its publication date, the novel was immediately understood as commentary on the series of significant lawsuits about race that culminated in the great civil-rights acts of the 1960s. There are two notorious cases that haunt this work. First is Alabama's Scottsboro case of 1931, in which – following a blatantly unfair trial – eight black teenagers received the death penalty in Alabama for raping two white girls. Second is the shocking murder of the 14-year-old African American Emmett Till, in Mississippi in 1955, for whistling at a white woman – widely regarded as a major spur to the civil-rights movement.
Most important was the groundbreaking 1954 Brown vs Board of Education case. The US Supreme Court over-ruled the "separate but equal" education provision of the previous half-century, and precipitated wider challenges to discrimination – not least the great Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 in Harper Lee's state, Alabama.
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