Atticus Finch: The Biography

by Joseph Crespino

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541644939
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	10/20/2020
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	648,020
Product dimensions:	5.45(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.95(d)

About the Author

Joseph Crespino is the Jimmy Carter Professor of history at Emory University. He is the author of In Search of Another Country, winner of the 2008 Lillian Smith Book Award from the Southern Regional Council, and Strom Thurmond's America. He lives in Decatur, Georgia.

Table of Contents

Prologue xiii

Part I Origins

Chapter 1 The View from the Square 3

Chapter 2 Jackassonian Democrats 31

Part II Atticus Imagined

Chapter 3 Setting a Watchman 73

Chapter 4 The Boiling Frog 101

Part III Atticus in The World

Chapter 5 The Noble Man 127

Chapter 6 Letter from Maycomb Jail 157

Epilogue 175

Acknowledgments 185

Notes 189

Bibliography 223

Index 235

Editorial Reviews

…[a] crisp, illuminating examination of Harper Lee's dueling doppelgängers and their real-life model, Lee's politician father, A. C. Lee. Crespino…displays a confident understanding of the era of genteel white supremacists like A. C. Lee. He understands that the New South still labors, as Lee's daughter did throughout her long, complicated life, under an old shadow…This book opens a window into Mockingbird's scrubbed-up Alabama of memory, into the literary politics of the modern South, and into the argument that existed in Lee's imagination when she arrived at 19 on the University of Alabama's campus in 1945 and when she died in a Monroeville nursing home in 2016.

The New York Times Book Review - Howell Raines

02/26/2018
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)

Publishers Weekly

"Lucid, accomplished, eminently readable... Atticus Finch a blend of Southern history, literary criticism and group biography, is probably the best book about Harper Lee to come out since her death in 2016."—USA Today

"Although dismaying to some Lee fans, the belated publication of "Watchman," an apprentice work containing the germ plasm of "Mockingbird," cast light on the virtues and limitations of the author and her canonical novel. It also opened the door to serious scholarship like "Atticus Finch: The Biography," Joseph Crespino's crisp, illuminating examination of Harper Lee's dueling doppelgangers and their real-life model, Lee's politician father."—New York Times Book Review

"Readers interested in understanding the three different portrayals of Atticus Finch - the one found in "To Kill a Mockingbird," Gregory Peck's Atticus of the cinema, and the "warts and all" version found in Harper Lee's 2015 book, "Go Set a Watchman," will delight in this well researched backstory."—Bitter Southerner

"Insightful... [a] supple and incisive portrait of A.C. Lee."—Forward

"Mr. Crespino shows a gift for copious research and nuanced interpretation. He deftly parses the region's racial attitudes into a spectrum of views that reflected varying degrees of tolerance."—Wall Street Journal

"An in-depth look into the inspiration of Harper Lee's father, A.C. Lee, for the part of Atticus Finch... This will be of interest to anyone who studies Lee's work."—Library Journal

"Illuminating... Crespino combines the authority and command of the scholar with the grace of a storyteller, making Atticus a great read. He's crafted an earnest, lucid and concise history of the time in which the two voices of Atticus were created, and shown why they are so paradoxical."—Arts ATL

"A fascinating, thoroughly researched new book... In nimbly navigating Harper Lee's divergent portrayals of Atticus Finch - and the complex contradictions of A.C. Lee - Crespino will send many readers back to her novels in search of further understanding."—Columbus Dispatch

"Crespino's scholarly and well-written history leaps to the top of the books you should read if you are a To Kill A Mockingbird devotee."—Bookreporter

"Mr. Crespino has written a nuanced biography, one that tells the twin stories of Harper Lee's development of the character Atticus Finch and her relationship and ideological struggles with her father Amasa Coleman (A.C.) Lee, the Alabama lawyer and newspaperman, on whom Harper Lee based the fictional Atticus."—Christian Science Monitor

"A nuanced and captivating study of Atticus Finch.... This insightful work elucidates the literary, personal, and civil rights issues that shaped Harper Lee and her two novels."—Publishers Weekly

"Besides drawing on newly available correspondence, [Crespino] 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.' ... An informed look at Southern history refracted through the lens of fiction."—KirkusReviews

"In this fascinating book, Crespino examines Harper Lee's creation of Atticus Finch, the fictional hero based on her father, lawyer and newspaper editor A.C. Lee, and carefully traces the arc of his life as it reflected the South wrestling with the civil rights movement."—National Book Review

"A thoughtful, fascinating study offering fresh revelations and insights about To Kill a Mockingbird.... Atticus Finch is a valuable new key to the mystery that is Ms. Lee."—Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning authorof Carry Me Home

But Joe Crespino's beautiful study of Atticus Finch, in fact and fiction, also brings to life a writer, her father, and an entire people—all caught in history's clenches. It is an impressive achievement, from start to finish."—Sean Wilentz, author of TheRise of American Democracy

"In this brilliantly researched and beautifully written work, Joe Crespino explores the fictions of Atticus Finch to expose the facts about white southerners in the age of Jim Crow."—Kevin Kruse, author of One Nation Under God

"In this incisive and engaging work, Joseph Crespino lets us see all the iterations of Atticus Finch—the hero of 'Mockingbird,' the villain of 'Watchman,' and, most fascinatingly, the complex, conflicted real-life inspiration for both, Harper Lee's father, Amasa Coleman Lee."—Samuel G. Freedman, Columbia School of Journalism

"To Kill a Mockingbird was a publishing sensation in its day, a staple of school reading lists for decades, and an enduring lens for understanding the politics of civil rights. Joe Crespino's smart and highly readable 'biography' of Atticus Finch gives us the story behind the story, from Harper Lee's family history to her emergence as a writer to her later fame. In so doing, he recaptures the lost diversity and complexity of thought and the perspectives about race and integration not just in midcentury America but within the white South itself."—David Greenberg, author of Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency

From the Publisher

Narrator Dan Woren leads listeners through the convoluted creation of Harper Lee’s classic, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. He uses his authoritative voice to deliver the biography of Lee’s father and comment on how she used many of his traits to bring Atticus Finch to life. It’s both a fascinating exploration of the creative process and a picture of the Jim Crow days of the Deep South, when lynchings were commonplace. Woren’s slow and steady pace effectively delivers Crespino’s study of the first draft of Lee’s manuscript, published recently as GO SET A WATCHMAN, and why in many ways the first version of the story is more truthful and illuminating than the beloved classic. R.O. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2018 - AudioFile

Narrator Dan Woren leads listeners through the convoluted creation of Harper Lee’s classic, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. He uses his authoritative voice to deliver the biography of Lee’s father and comment on how she used many of his traits to bring Atticus Finch to life. It’s both a fascinating exploration of the creative process and a picture of the Jim Crow days of the Deep South, when lynchings were commonplace. Woren’s slow and steady pace effectively delivers Crespino’s study of the first draft of Lee’s manuscript, published recently as GO SET A WATCHMAN, and why in many ways the first version of the story is more truthful and illuminating than the beloved classic. R.O. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2018 - AudioFile

2018-02-06
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.

Kirkus Reviews