Atticus Finch: The Biography

Emory history professor Crespino (Strom Thurmond’s America) offers a nuanced and captivating study of Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird’s hero and Go Set a Watchman’s bigoted antagonist, by exploring how author Harper Lee’s own father provided the model for both versions of the character. Much admired by his daughter, Amasa Coleman Lee (1880–1962) of Monroeville, Ala., was a largely self-educated, widely read lawyer, legislator, and newspaper editor. Crespino draws on Harper Lee’s letters, interviews with her family members, and hundreds of A.C. Lee’s editorials for his paper, the Monroe Journal, to highlight his subject’s “unstinting propriety,” horror of mob rule and lynchings, and paternalistic prejudice against African-Americans, whom he deemed unfit for full integration into Southern society. Harper Lee created the Atticus of Go Set a Watchman, Crespino explains, out of conflicted feelings toward principled but segregationist white Southerners like her father. He also shows how, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee idealized Atticus in reaction to a more radical, KKK-allied segregationist movement that ran counter to her father’s values. To defend her father and the Southern values he represented, Harper focused on Atticus’s preoccupation with his children’s moral education and told her classic coming-of-age story mainly from a child’s viewpoint. This insightful work elucidates the literary, personal, and civil rights issues that shaped Harper Lee and her two novels. (May)