"Cliff Notes - To Kill A Mockingbird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)
HARPER LEE'S
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
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. Like Atticus Finch in the story, Miss Lee's father Amasa C. Lee was a small-town lawyer with an unusual first name. The Lee family was descended from the famous Confederate Civil War general Robert E. Lee, and so--like the Finches in the novel--had every reason to take pride in its ancestry. Finally, Lee's mother's maiden name was Frances Finch.
As a child Lee was called by her first name, Nelle, a name she dropped in her adult years. She was only seven years old when she decided she wanted to become a writer, but it was many years before her dream was fulfilled. In the meantime Miss Lee studied law, following in the footsteps of her father and older sister. She attended the University of Alabama, and spent a year in England as an exchange student at Oxford University.
In 1950 Lee left the university without completing the requirements for a law degree. She moved to New York City where she worked as an airlines reservation clerk. Her childhood desire to become a writer now returned and she spent evenings and spare time working on essays and short stories. Eventually she got up the courage to show a few of her best pieces to a New York literary agent. The agent liked one of the stories and suggested that it be expanded into a novel.
On the basis of this encouragement, Lee decided to quit her airlines job and devote herself full time to writing. The decision meant she would have to sacrifice some comforts. She moved into a shabby apartment that did not even have hot water. She made do with whatever furniture she could pick up free or construct from orange crates and other discards. She was not able to work without interruption, however. Just as she was making some progress on her novel, her father suffered a sudden illness. From then on she made extended visits back home, dividing her time between New York and Alabama.
It turned out that the trips to Alabama were not a bad thing as far as her novel was concerned. Being home again brought Lee closer to the scene of her childhood memories of her relationship with her father, and the time she had spent with him at the courthouse. There was even an old house in her neighborhood where it had been rumored that the owner was a mysterious recluse, rather like the Boo Radley character in To Kill a Mockingbird.
While much of the background for the novel came from Lee's childhood experiences, the plot was primarily drawn from her imagination. As a result of her study of law, Lee was familiar with numerous cases involving a black man convicted on the basis of little or no solid evidence of raping a white woman. These incidents were transformed by the author into the fictional case of Tom Robinson that makes up the central portion of the novel. Lee later told an interviewer that she never thought of her years studying law as wasted effort, since she was forced to develop her skills in logical thinking and clear writing. Also, legal cases provided her with a fertile source of story ideas.
It was 1957 before Lee managed to finish a draft of her novel. The first editor who read the manuscript turned it down, explaining that it was nothing more than a series of short stories strung together. Lee agreed with the criticism, and took the draft back for reworking. With help from her editor, Lee spent the next two and a half years transforming the manuscript into the novel you know today as To Kill a Mockingbird. There were many times when she became discouraged and doubted that the book would ever be published. She later said that these years remained in her memory as "a long and hopeless period of writing the book over and over again."
Finally in 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird was ready for publication. The reception of the novel made up for all the years of hard work and struggle. Not only was the book well liked by reviewers, it was an instant success with readers young and old. Several book clubs, including the Literary Guild, chose the novel as a selection. The movie rights were sold almost immediately, the story becoming the basis for a successful movie starring Gregory Peck in the role of the small-town lawyer Atticus Finch. In 1961 Lee's success was crowned with a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, making her the first woman to win the award since 1942.
As a result of the success of her first novel, Harper Lee became something of a celebrity. She was the subject of articles in such magazines as Life and Newsweek, and the elite fashion magazine Vogue published one of her essays. It soon became apparent that Lee did not enjoy being the center of so much attention. Although by no means a hermit, she seemed to have some of the impulse that led people like her eccentric character Boo Radley to avoid public exposure. Lee insisted that in spite of her success she still considered herself a journeyman writer, and she turned aside attempts to get her to answer personal questions with witty but not very revealing answers. Having returned to Alabama to work on her second novel, Lee complained that even there it was difficult to find the privacy she needed to work without interruption. In the South, she said, friends and neighbors who know you are working at home think nothing of dropping by unannounced for coffee.
More than twenty years have gone by since Lee gave this description of her forthcoming work, and the novel has yet to appear. Nor has Lee ever given a public explanation for the long delay.
The success of To Kill a Mockingbird was by no means a fluke. The novel was the product of a long dedication to the craft of writing, and years of hard work devoted to shaping the manuscript into its final form. Perhaps the best measure of the novel's quality is that it has aged very little in two and a half decades. Readers still see themselves in the characters of Scout and Jem Finch, and are moved in turn to tears and laughter by the story.
^^^^^^^^^^TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: THE PLOT
The story begins during the summer when Jean Louise Finch, nicknamed Scout, is six years old, and her brother Jem is about to enter the fifth grade. One day the two children meet a new playmate, seven-year-old Dill, who has come from Mississippi to spend the summer with his Aunt Rachel. Dill is fascinated by the neighborhood gossip about "Boo" Radley, a man in his thirties who has not been seen outside of his home in years. Egged on by Dill, Jem and Scout try to think up ways to lure Boo Radley out of his house, and they play games based on various stories they have heard about the Radley family. Their favorite part of the game is acting out an incident in which Boo Radley supposedly stabbed his father in the leg with a pair of scissors.
When fall comes, Scout enters the first grade. Because she has already taught herself how to read and write, Scout finds school a disappointment. Both she and Jem are intrigued, however, by the discovery that someone has been leaving small gifts in a knothole in one of the large oak trees on the corner of the Radley property.
Soon it is summer again, and Dill returns for another visit. The children's schemes for making contact with Boo Radley grow bolder this year, and on Dill's last night in town they decide to sneak up onto the Radley porch and spy on Boo through the window. Jem goes first, but just as he reaches the window, Nathan Radley, Boo's brother, catches sight of the children and frightens them off with a blast from his shotgun. Jem is in such a hurry to get away that he leaves his trousers behind when they catch on a wire fence. That night Jem goes back to retrieve his pants and finds that someone has mended them and left them neatly folded over the fence, as if just waiting for his return.
By now Jem realizes that Boo Radley is not a monster after all, but has been playing along with the children's games. Scout does not figure this out until the following winter, on the night that the house of their neighbor, Miss Maudie, burns to the ground. While Scout is standing outside in the cold watching the fire, someone sneaks up behind her and places a blanket around her shoulders. Later, Scout and Jem realize that there was only one person in town who was not already at work fighting the fire--Boo Radley.
Now that Jem and Scout realize that Boo Radley is basically a kind person, their interest in the Radley family begins to fade. In the meantime, however, they learn that their father Atticus has become the defense lawyer for Tom Robinson, a black man who is charged with raping Mayella Ewell, a white girl. At first the children care about the case only because it means that their friends have begun to call Atticus nasty names. Atticus warns them that they mustn't get drawn into fist fights over these taunts.
Scout manages to keep out of fights until Christmas day, when her least favorite cousin calls Atticus a "nigger-lover," and she responds by punching him. After this incident Scout and Jem begin to think that perhaps their father's hatred of violence is just a sign of weakness on his part. Their suspicions are supported by Atticus' dislike of hunting. Although both children have received air rifles for Christmas, their father makes no secret of his disapproval. Then one day a mad dog wanders into the neighborhood and the sheriff calls on Atticus to put the animal out of its misery. The children learn for the first time that their "feeble" father was once the best marksman in Maycomb County, and has given up shooting out of choice, not fear.
Even knowing this, the children find it hard to follow Atticus' example and hold their tempers. One old lady in the neighborhood, Mrs. Dubose, makes Jem so angry with her insulting remarks about Atticus that he destroys every flower in her garden. To make amends Jem has to read to Mrs. Dubose every afternoon for two months. Only after Mrs. Dubose has died do Jem and Scout learn that the old lady was struggling to overcome an addiction to drugs. Atticus tells the children that Mrs. Dubose, unpleasant as she may have been, was a truly brave woman. Courage, he says, is not "a man with a gun," it is the willingness to fight back even when the odds are stacked against you.
As the trial of Tom Robinson grows nearer, the children become more aware of the strong feelings it has aroused in everyone in Maycomb. One day their housekeeper, Calpurnia, takes Jem and Scout to visit her church, and the children realize for the first time that the black parishioners are supporting Tom Robinson's wife because no one in town will hire her.
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