A STUDY OF AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY IN HARPER LEE’S NOVEL TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM

Literary work in the form of novel is closely related with the real life. Author puts some ideas inspired by events that ever happened in his/her life. One of a literary work that involves author’s life experiences is the novel by Harper Lee entitle To Kill A Mockingbird.
This study is conducted to know (1) what is Harper Lee’s life experience (2) how are the author’s historical background reflected through her novel To Kill A Mockingbird. Researcher will focus on some similarities or conformities of life-experience of the author in her literary work.
This study is a descriptive qualitative study. The source of data in this study is a novel written by Harper Lee entitled To Kill A Mockingbird. The data itself were the utterances of characters and narrator’s narration in the novel. This study is done based on biographical criticism. This approach is preceded the historical and experimental events in author’s life toward her work. This approach concerns with the incident, character and some issue that happen in the past then becoming the idea of this story.
The result of this study can be seen as follow: Researcher found five data according to the biography of author, they are; character, characterization, setting, plot and theme. Some characters based on the surrounding people of author’s life and some events in the story inspired by the real incidents when the author in the same age as the main character in the novel.