When did the book To Kill a Mockingbird take place?
Harper Lee wasn't specific about the dates, but apparently it took place in the mid 1930s. Check this background out.
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mocking/context.html
Yes, that's what I thought. Sparknotes is where I acquired the information that it was set in the '30s, only my teacher said it was set in the '50s. Do you know of any other sources that say when it was set--just to be sure?
When Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, her home state of Alabama was a hotbed of Civil Rights activity. Throughout the South, blacks and whites were segregated. African-Americans used different drinking fountains, entrances, and restroom facilities. They also had to sit on the back of public buses and were expected to move if a white person wanted their seat. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her momentous decision sparked a yearlong bus boycott, giving new life to the Civil Rights movement and propelling Martin Luther King, Jr. to national prominence. Civil Rights issues were heating up across the nation, too, and so the subject of To Kill a Mockingbird was quite timely upon its publication.
Lee, however, chose to set her story in the Great Depression of the 1930s. She may have had many reasons for placing the story in that time. Scout, the story�fs protagonist and narrator, is a semi-autobiographical character, and Lee was roughly the same age as Scout in the 1930s. Also, writers often choose to place a story about a current issue in the past or in the future to give readers an objective place from which to ponder the issue. Most likely, though, Lee chose the 1930s because Civil Rights issues didn�ft just begin in the late 1950s.�ftThank you for using the Jiskha Homework Help Forum. Possibly your teacher was thinking of when the book was first published. From Barron's Booknotes:
THE AUTHOR AND HER TIMES
-
When To Kill a Mockingbird was first published in 1960, interviewers
who met the author often felt as if they were coming face to face with
a grownup version of Scout Finch, the six-year-old heroine of the
novel. Although she was almost thirty-five years old, Harper Lee was a
youthful looking woman with angular features and a casual,
short-cropped hairstyle that marked her as a former tomboy.
Appearances were not deceiving. A brief glance at the facts of Lee's
life shows that reviewers were right to suspect that the portrait of
Scout was to a large degree autobiographical. Harper Lee grew up in
the deep South in Monroeville, Alabama, a place very much like the
imaginary town of Maycomb described in the novel. She was born in
1926, which would make her roughly the same age as Scout in the
mid-1930s when the novel takes place.
Now, from CliffsNotes:
When Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, her home state of Alabama was a hotbed of Civil Rights activity. Throughout the South, blacks and whites were segregated. African-Americans used different drinking fountains, entrances, and restroom facilities. They also had to sit on the back of public buses and were expected to move if a white person wanted their seat. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her momentous decision sparked a yearlong bus boycott, giving new life to the Civil Rights movement and propelling Martin Luther King, Jr. to national prominence. Civil Rights issues were heating up across the nation, too, and so the subject of To Kill a Mockingbird was quite timely upon its publication.
Lee, however, chose to set her story in the Great Depression of the 1930s. She may have had many reasons for placing the story in that time. Scout, the story�fs protagonist and narrator, is a semi-autobiographical character, and Lee was roughly the same age as Scout in the 1930s. Also, writers often choose to place a story about a current issue in the past or in the future to give readers an objective place from which to ponder the issue. Most likely, though, Lee chose the 1930s because Civil Rights issues didn�ft just begin in the late 1950s.
So there are two more sources.
Wow, thanks.