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The Novel Of Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee

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For anyone who has grown up in a small town, it’s a fact that villages are not as romantic as authors tend to make them. Though towns are typically filled with honest, caring people, there is often a sense of confinement and conformity about them that makes small towns best suited to childhood and retirement. The evolving years in between are often spent dreaming of other places. In most books, however, that side of small town life is rarely relayed; instead, rural life is portrayed as simple, innocent, and beautiful. Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, balances a fine line between reverence and startling honesty when it comes to her fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama. Lee handles this setting, which greatly impacts the storyline, with both nostalgic affection and bluntness. Having grown up in a small town of her own, she seems to respect what they’ve come to symbolize and the utopia people can find them to be, but she has no illusions about the discriminatory undercurrents of 1930s life within small towns. True to the time period, the citizens of Maycomb take care of each other and are generally close-knit, but they also demonstrate deep racism and violence when Atticus Finch, the town’s lawyer, decides to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman. The residents of Maycomb transition from kind people to rude, uneducated, and at times downright dangerous aggressors. Though they seem to be generally good at heart, racism twists them into

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