Atticus Finch
The Biography
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Who was the real Atticus Finch? A prize-winning historian reveals the man behind the legend
The publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2015 forever changed how we think about Atticus Finch. Once seen as a paragon of decency, he was reduced to a small-town racist. How are we to understand this transformation?
In Atticus Finch, historian Joseph Crespino draws on exclusive sources to reveal how Harper Lee's father provided the central inspiration for each of her books. A lawyer and newspaperman, A. C. Lee was a principled opponent of mob rule, yet he was also a racial paternalist. Harper Lee created the Atticus of Watchman out of the ambivalence she felt toward white southerners like him. But when a militant segregationist movement arose that mocked his values, she revised the character in To Kill a Mockingbird to defend her father and to remind the South of its best traditions. A story of family and literature amid the upheavals of the twentieth century, Atticus Finch is essential to understanding Harper Lee, her novels, and her times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
