Why was "To kill a Mockingbird" written?

Question

Can ya'll give me the source yall used because iam trying to figure out why did the author,Harper Lee, write it.. Was there a reason,,was she going through a hard time...(help) need to solve this for a project

Answer 1

In part you might believe it was opportunity. By 1956 she had written a number of stories and in December of that year she received a gift of taking one year off from her job to write with no pressure. Within a year she had the first draft of “To Kill Mockingbird.” She then worked with editor Tay Hohoff (of the publisher J.B. Lippincott) completing this book in the summer of 1959.

There are some parallels between Harper’s childhood and the character of Scout (both had attorney fathers). Did she pull the plot from another book, such as Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust? Certainly there is some commonality in plot line in that both were in the South and both were about a black man killing a white man, but not much else. The black in Faulkner’s gets off primarily due to efforts of teenagers and Lee’s black is convicted and then is killed attempting to escape.

The more interesting unknown is, did Harper Lee have a “ghost” co-writer. Namely Truman Capote who was a close childhood friend (the source of the charactor Dill) and some one she periodically work with.

Mentioning the character Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, Capote described the differences in his and Lee's writing styles: "In my original version of Other Voices, Other Rooms I had that same man living in the house that used to leave things in the trees, and then I took that out. He was a real man, and he lived just down the road from us. We used to go and get those things out of the trees. Everything she wrote about it is absolutely true. But you see, I take the same thing and transfer it into some Gothic dream, done in an entirely different way.

We’ll never know because all of the people are dead (it could be the plot of a new novel).

However, if you are seeking to find that Harper Lee had some great social goal of pointing out some cultural injustice, no, I don’t think so. She was merely an author who wrote an astounding work of fiction.

Answer 2

She plagiarised the plot from Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, thats fo' sho'.