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How Did Tkom Influence Tkam

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Writers can’t help but be influenced by the events and people that they see around them. This is because they can communicate their feelings and/or beliefs about the world around them through characters, setting, and the scale of events in a given text. The influence becomes a part of the work that they write because, like a limb, a writer’s story is a part of them – their mind and imagination. This is clearly portrayed in To Kill a Mockingbird (TKAM) by Harper Lee, who has made extensive use of a microcosm within her characterisations to thoroughly explore a wide range of societal issues. Within TKAM, the essence of the Deep South in the 1930’s is explored through the experiences of a girl named Scout. While the majority of the book is, essentially …show more content…

In the beginning of the novel, Scout and Jem are innocent children, they were naïve. They have never seen evil, so they automatically assume people are good. This is until, though, the controversial trial of Tom Robinson, an innocent black man accused of raping a young white girl. In the time period when Harper Lee was going up, there were a number of similar cases including the Scottsboro Trials and The Emmett Till Murder Case. When Lee was about 6 years old (1931), the Scottsboro Trials was a highly publicised court case that involved several young African American men. In a small community in Alabama, nine young African American men were arrested as they hopped of a train they had been ‘riding the rails on’. Two white women also followed them out, and accused the men of raping them on the train. Now, this case has many parallels with TKAM, and also represents what society was like in the period that Lee grew up in. In both trials, young black men were accused of raping a young white girl; both were sentenced to jail and/or death (we don’t know what Tom Robinson’s sentence was because he died before he could receive it); and both lots of black men/man were found guilty. In this way we know that there are for sure several consistencies between Lee’s childhood and current life, and what is depicted within the

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