How Did The Great Depression Affect To Kill A Mockingbird

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Recommended: Representations of the theme family life in to kill a mockingbird

Isaiah Hall
Hard Times: Real World Influences on Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird
In the 1930’s, almost everyone was poor. Unemployment rates skyrocketed, poverty ran rampant, and even the most wealthy people lost some of their financial stability. It took World War Two to pull the United States out of the Great Depression. All of this due to the stock market crash of 1929. Harper Lee was influenced by the struggle of life in the real world to write To Kill a Mockingbird. The Great depression especially influenced her. She used this inspiration to make TKM a great novel.
To begin with, the Great Depression especially influenced Harper Lee to write To Kill a Mockingbird because of how it affected the economy and the common people. During …show more content…

Cunningham would ever pay us. “Not in money,” Atticus said, “but before the year’s out I’ll have been paid. You watch.” We watched. One morning Jem and I found a load of stovewood in the back yard. Later, a sack of hickory nuts appeared on the back steps. With Christmas came a crate of smilax and holly. That spring when we found a crokersack full of turnip greens, Atticus said Mr. Cunningham had more than paid …show more content…

People of that time made use of their resources to trade for what they needed because they did not have much money. Lee also showed in her novel that many people could not hold jobs during the Great Depression. The poverty cycle of the Great Depression was caused by “Unemployment… [and] Men searched for jobs where they lived but there were none to be had”(Poverty). Also, “In 1933, at the worst point in the Great Depression years, unemployment rates in the United States reached almost 25%, with more than 11 million people looking for work”(Unemployment). Lee included the fact of unemployment in her book with Mr. Cunningham. Mr. Cunningham could not make any money on his farm, and the only job he would be able to get is with the WPA. He did not want a job with the WPA because “he was willing to go hungry to keep his land and vote as he pleased”(Lee 26). Another thing that Harper Lee took from the real world and depicted in her novel is how farmers were suffering and losing their farms during the Great Depression because the value of crops dropped to a point where farmers could not make any profits. During this time “prices dropped so low that many farmers went bankrupt and lost their farms. In some cases, the price of a bushel of corn fell to just eight or ten cents”(Farms and Cities). In Lee’s novel, Atticus tells Scout that “The Cunninghams are…

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