Historian Joseph Crespino tells his story chronologically, as Go Set a Watchman was the novel Lee drafted first. This deft editorial decision provides Atticus Finch with an unusual degree of suspense and momentum. Crespino examines both novels and the Gregory Peck film alongside new archival material and a deep knowledge of national, regional, and local politics. He traces Lee’s evolution as a novelist and the ways in which Atticus Finch resembled her father, Amasa Coleman Lee. Through literary historical and biographical lenses, he explicates superbly the political contexts in which Lee wrote her novel, and in which readers understood the tale. Crespino attends to the beliefs of white Southern ‘moderates’ and explores their varying commitments to civil rights. To do so, he frames the book with Dr King’s famed observation in his 1963 ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ that those anti-violence, mild-mannered white men who preferred order over true justice were obstacles, just as the Klan was, to achieving civil rights.

Harper Lee during Medal of Freedom ceremony at the White House (photo by Eric Draper)Making use of A.C. Lee’s editorials between 1929 and 1947 in his weekly newspaper, the Monroe Journal, Crespino portrays a principled lawyer who opposed lynching, political corruption, European fascism, and American isolationism. Lee supported Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation until 1937, when attempts to introduce minimum wage legislation threatened, in his view, the ability of Southern states to attract industry. Just as Lee’s conservatism ramped up, his daughter Nelle Harper Lee went off to a University of Alabama enlivened by wartime politics and a new cohort of students given a chance to study after serving in the armed forces. In this crucible, as Crespino demonstrates with some wonderful sections on Lee’s student writings, she developed political beliefs at odds with those of most white Southerners, including her father. Watchman, Crespino tells us, was her effort to reconcile these disagreements with her belief that her father was a good man.

Watchman, chock-full of political speeches and an improbable conclusion, failed. But Lee’s agent and potential publishers encouraged her to return to earlier, unpublished short stories and combine their light-hearted tone with her political themes. Just a few months later, she had a full draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. As Crespino observes, Lee’s decision to move the action from the 1950s to the 1930s was the key to making the story palatable to people who were ‘moderates’ on race issues. By the late 1950s, when Watchman is set, it was clear that most white Southerners were intent on resisting desegregation. But a novel set in the 1930s could avoid this hard truth. Lee was thus able to maintain a sentimental vision of Atticus as a good man. By having children as the narrators and engines of the plot, Lee left the reader with a sense of hope – perhaps signalling her own resistance to her father’s position – that the next generation would feel differently about race and social change than did their parents.

Gregory Peck in a publicity photo for To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962 (via Wikimedia Commons)In a book that takes a biographical as well as a historical lens to questions of social justice, it is a shame Crespino does not discuss Lee’s sexuality. He remarks on Lee’s disinclination for skirts, jewellery, and make-up; on her classmates’ recollection of her ‘dowdy’ appearance; and on her intense friendship and working relationship with Truman Capote. He does not mention that Lee never married, nor her reference in a university newspaper piece to ‘fairies … huddled together reading The Well of Loneliness’. None of this is conclusive, of course, but if Lee was indeed always an outsider to the South, with continuing reservations about her father’s views, her sexuality may have been an important part of her feeling of alienation. A queer reading of both novels shows, too, that Lee’s use of an adult narrator threaded an irony through Mockingbird that was (and is) lost on readers keen on a morality tale, but appealed to others who perceived in the novel a subtle critique of the very moderation it seems to extol. Indeed, as Howell Raines remarks in his review of Atticus Finch, it is telling that Lee lived most of her long life in New York, not in Monroeville, Alabama.

This book’s primary aim, however, is to explain why readers love the book and Atticus Finch. By placing Lee and her father in context, and by reflecting on the long-term shift toward conservatism in US politics that has sustained the book’s continuing popularity, Crespino achieves his goal admirably. This well-written and nimbly paced book reminds us of the kinds of commitments and actions required for true social and political change.