Atticus Finch

February 26, 2018
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 15, 2018

Crespino (Jimmy Carter Professor of History, Emory Univ.; In Search of Another Country), winner of the 2008 Lillian Smith Award, delves into new materials to offer an in-depth look into the inspiration of Harper Lee's father, A.C. Lee, for the part of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. Many of Lee's friends, remaining family, and publishing associates, in addition to biographer Charles J. Shields, made unpublished letters and papers available to Crespino. He also drew on the archives of the Monroe Journal and the Monroe County Museum to offer insights into the life and times of the Lees. A.C., who was trained as a lawyer and journalist, recognized and encouraged Harper's interests and talents. His response to politics and attitudes in his home were not unusual for the times, and while he did not follow the crowd, his views were ultimately racist and paternalistic. Author Lee would use his attitudes in her fiction, creating Atticus as a hero in To Kill a Mockingbird and tearing him down in Go Set a Watchman. VERDICT This will be of interest to anyone who studies Lee's work.--Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2018
The creation and evolution of a fictional character serves as a mirror of racial politics.Atticus Finch appeared in two novels written by Harper Lee: as the hero of the Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960; and as a more complex character--hardly a "touchstone of decency and goodness"--in Lee's first novel, Go Set a Watchman, not published until 2015. Crespino (History/Emory Univ.; Strom Thurmond's America, 2012, etc.) makes the fictional Atticus central to his study of Lee's father, lawyer and newspaper editor A.C. Lee; Harper's career as a writer; and, what gives the book heft, a close look at the Southern politics and civil rights struggles in the 1950s and '60s from which Lee's fiction emerged. When Mockingbird first appeared, A.C. was surprised when his neighbors in Monroeville, Alabama, greeted him as Atticus Finch. "He hadn't recognized himself in the book at all," writes the author. Nor would he have recognized himself in the "shrewd lawyer" with racist views of Go Set a Watchman. Lee's first book was unsettling to many of Mockingbird's fans precisely because Atticus was both a "principled southerner" and "a pragmatic segregationist." While biographers have assumed A.C. was the inspiration for Atticus in Mockingbird, Crespino probes the extent to which Lee portrayed her father in the darker Watchman. Besides drawing on newly available correspondence, he examines hundreds of editorials in which A.C. expressed opinions on local and national issues to offer a nuanced portrait of a man of "paternalistic sensibilities" who "saw no profit in inflaming racial passions on either side of the color line." The Atticus of Mockingbird, who exuded "moral courage, tolerance, and understanding," evolved, Crespino asserts, from the portrayal in Watchman of a man who abided the "hypocrisy and injustice" of his own generation. Lee's Atticus was himself transformed by Gregory Peck in a movie adaptation that underscored stalwart virtue.An informed look at Southern history refracted through the lens of fiction.

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