“Well, Heck": Confounding Grace in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

Lawyers love to write about To Kill a Mockingbird, which they believe to have been written by one of their own, but as the recent publication of an early draft of Harper Lee’s best-selling novel reveals, there is more to her Pulitzer Prize-winning story of the American South than an exhilarating trial scene and an exemplary lawyer. This article attends to the importance of grace in the development of Lee’s artistic vision through a close reading of the novel’s morally compromised conclusion, where an incarnational ethic of love ultimately (though perhaps imperfectly) fulfills the purpose of the law.