Historical figure · Pearson Edexcel International GCSE revision on Incandio

Harper Lee

Portrait of Harper Lee

Author of To Kill a Mockingbird · Novelist · 1926–2016

The author of 'To Kill a Mockingbird', a novel of childhood, conscience and racial injustice in the segregated South, drawn from the Alabama world she knew.

Defend these ideas against Harper

Incandio is a free revision platform for the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE, and on it a topic counts as mastered only once you have learned it, proved it in questions, taught it back and defended it against the person with the strongest claim on it. Harper Lee is that person for 10 topics on the course — 8 of them:

Who was Harper?

Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama. In 1960 she published 'To Kill a Mockingbird': narrated by the child Scout Finch, it follows her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, as he defends Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in the segregated South, while the children puzzle over their reclusive neighbour, Boo Radley. It won the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the most beloved and taught novels in America — a study of prejudice, justice, empathy and moral courage. She guarded her privacy fiercely and published almost nothing else for most of her life; a related early manuscript, 'Go Set a Watchman', appeared only in 2015. She had earlier helped her childhood friend Truman Capote research 'In Cold Blood'.

Major achievements

Life in brief

Explore the life of Harper — five chapters

  1. Monroeville — A lawyer father, a strange neighbour, and a boy called Truman
  2. A Year's Wages — A Christmas present, and two years of rewriting
  3. Kansas — The research she did for In Cold Blood
  4. What the Novel Does and Does Not Do — Fifty years of praise and objection
  5. Go Set a Watchman — A second book, fifty-five years later

Read the five-chapter life of Harper Lee →

Debate Harper in the Agora

Reading is the start. On Incandio an idea counts as mastered only once you have argued it against the person with the strongest claim on it, in structured rounds marked against published descriptors.

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