Book Review: Atticus Finch: A Biography

Atticus Finch

The Biography

by Joseph Crespino

Perseus Books, Basic Books

Basic Books

Biographies & Memoirs

Pub Date 20 Oct 2020

I am reviewing a copy of Atticus Finch, The Biography through Perseus Books, Basic Books and Netgalley:

Atticus Finch was born on Christmas Day 1956. She would not be heading home to Alabama for the Holidays. She couldn’t get time off from her job as an airline reservationist, so she spent Christmas with her closest friends in New York, Michael and Joy Brown and their two boys.

Watchman was Harper Lee’s effort to make sense of her father’s conservatism amid the madness of massive resistance. Yet that first novel didn’t succeed.

In this book, historian Joseph Crespino draws on exclusive sources to reveal how Harper Lee’s father provided the central inspiration for each of her books. Harper Lee’s Father, A.C Lee was a lawyer and newspaperman. He was a principled opponent to opponent but he was also a racial paternalist.

When Harper Lee created the Atticus Finch of the Watchman out of the ambivalence she felt toward white southerners like him. After 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.

If you are looking for an in-depth look at Harpers Lee Character Atticus Finch, I recommend historian Joseph Crespino in depth book on the Subject titled Atticus Finch!

Five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!