Review Essay: Joseph Crespino's Atticus Finch: The Biography

In Atticus Finch: The Biography Joseph Crespino has given us a brilliant, readable historian's rumination on the making of a literary icon. How did Harper Lee conceive of Atticus? What were the subtleties in her own understanding of this most iconic of fictional characters, and how did Atticus capture our hearts and imagination as he did? These are the questions Crespino addresses, and I was surprised at the depth of personal reflection this book prompted. I was thirteen when my father gave me a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. This was 1960 and the book had just appeared, and in my own Alabama family---with roots in the county where Harper Lee was born---Mockingbird carried its share of controversy. One of my aunts refused to read it, so offended was she by its revelations of racial injustice.

My father was a different story. Like Atticus, he was a lawyer who believed that the courts, alone among human institutions, were "the great leveler," and when he was elected as a circuit judge in the year of Mockingbird's publication, he had promised Black voters that his courtroom would be colorblind. But in our family all of this was a delicate dance, for my father was also a segregationist, deeply invested in the status quo. As Crespino reminds us, this was also true of Atticus. We know this because Harper Lee told us so, not so much in Mockingbird, though there were intimations of paternalism, but in her second book, Go Set a Watchman, which she had actually written first. Atticus is older in Watchman, and to the horror of many American readers, he is not as likeable the second time around. As Crespino writes, "Atticus, though physically weakened, is still wry, lively, and loving. The novel turns when Jean Louise discovers a racist, right-wing book among his reading materials. She heads immediately to the county courthouse where Atticus … had gone to a meeting. Looking on from the balcony, she discovers that it is a gathering of the White Citizens' Council. The rest of the novel tracks her outrage and disbelief that her wise and loving father would take up with such bigoted malcontents" (74).

Crespino makes a strong case that personal experiences for Harper Lee shaped the dual character of Atticus. If, as most biographers assume, her father A. C. Lee was one of the prototypes for Atticus, A. C.'s career as a small-town newspaper editor foreshadowed the depiction of Finch in both of Lee's novels. Crespino pores through the untapped trove of editorials in the Monroe Journal, which A. C. owned and edited for two decades. What he finds is a patrician idealist who believed in the law and good order and, among other things, hated the southern practice of lynching.

These ritualized killings were still widespread in the 1930s when Lee began his editorship of the Journal, and as he knew from his time as a lawyer, they sometimes enjoyed the cover of the courts. Lee once represented two Black men accused of murdering a White man, and one of the victim's sons was a member of the jury. Despite Lee's objections, the verdict was swift and his clients were hung. A few years later a Black man accused of raping and murdering a White woman was kidnapped from a small-town jail about forty miles south of Monroeville. Crespino describes what happened next: "[T]hey took him to an alternate location and murdered him, but not before subjecting him to two hours of sadistic torture, including castration, forced autocannibalism, stabbing, burning with hot irons, and dismemberment of toes and fingers. They tied Neal's body to the back of a car" (13-14).

A. C. Lee hated such moments of barbarism and carried stories on the front page of the Journal about the grand jury investigation that followed...