Go Set a Watchman is a novel by Harper Lee that was published in 2015 by HarperCollins (US) and Heinemann (UK). Written before her only other published novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Go Set a Watchman was initially promoted as a sequel by its publishers. It is now accepted that it was a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, with many passages in that book being used again.[2][3][4]
The title comes from the Book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible: "For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth" (Chapter 21, Verse 6),[5] which is quoted in the book's seventh chapter by Mr. Stone, the minister character. It alludes to Jean Louise Finch's view of her father, Atticus Finch, as the moral compass ("watchman") of Maycomb, Alabama,[6] and has a theme of disillusionment, as she discovers the extent of the bigotry in her home community. Go Set a Watchman tackles the racial tensions brewing in the South in the 1950s and delves into the complex relationship between father and daughter. It includes treatments of many of the characters who appear in To Kill a Mockingbird.[7]
A significant controversy around the decision to publish Go Set a Watchman centered on the allegations that 89-year-old Lee was taken advantage of by her publishers and pressured into allowing publication against her previously stated intentions.[8] Later, when it was realized that the book was an early draft as opposed to a distinct sequel, it was questioned why the novel had been published without any context.[9]
HarperCollins, United States, and William Heinemann, United Kingdom, published Go Set a Watchman on July 14, 2015. The book's unexpected discovery, decades after it was written, and the status of the author's only other book as an American classic, caused its publication to be highly anticipated.[10][9][11]Amazon stated that it was their "most pre-ordered book" since the final novel in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in 2007,[12] and stores arranged all-night openings beginning at midnight to cope with expected demand.[13]Go Set a Watchman set a record for the highest adult novel one-day sales at Barnes & Noble, which included digital sales and pre-orders made before July 14. Barnes & Noble declined to release the exact number.[14]
Plot
Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, 26 and single, returns from New York to her hometown of Maycomb, Alabama, for her annual fortnight-long visit to her father Atticus, a lawyer and former state legislator. Jack, her uncle and a retired doctor, is Jean Louise's mentor. Atticus' sister (Jean Louise's aunt), Alexandra, has moved in with Atticus to help him around the house after his housekeeper, Calpurnia, retired. Jean Louise's brother, Jeremy "Jem" Finch, has died of the same heart condition which killed their mother. Upon her arrival in Maycomb, Jean Louise is met by her childhood sweetheart Henry "Hank" Clinton, who works for Atticus. When returning from Finch's Landing, Jean Louise and Henry are passed by a car full of black men travelling at a dangerously high speed; Henry mentions that the black people in the county have money for cars but are without licenses and insurance.
The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) are introduced as sources of controversy in the community. Jean Louise finds a pamphlet titled "The Black Plague" among her father's papers. She follows him to a Citizens' Council meeting where Atticus introduces a man who delivers a racist speech. Jean Louise watches in secret from the balcony and is horrified. She is unable to forgive him for his behaviour and flees from the hall. After dreaming about Calpurnia, her family's black maid whom she sees as a mother figure, Jean Louise has breakfast with her father. They soon learn that Calpurnia's grandson killed a drunk pedestrian the previous night while speeding in his car. Atticus agrees to take the case in order to stop the NAACP from getting involved. Jean Louise visits Calpurnia and is treated politely but coldly, causing her to leave, devastated.
While at lunch, Jean Louise wants to know why Atticus was at the meeting. Uncle Jack tells her that Atticus has not suddenly become a racist but he is trying to slow down federal government intervention into state politics. Her uncle lectures her on the complexity of history, race, and politics in the South in an attempt to get Jean Louise to come to a conclusion, which she struggles to grasp. She then has a flashback to when she was a teenager and recalls an incident where Atticus planted the seed for an idea in Henry's brain, then let him come to the right conclusion on his own. Jean Louise tells Henry that she does not love him and will never marry him. She expresses her disgust at seeing him with her father at the council meeting. Henry explains that sometimes people have to do things they don't want to do. Henry then defends his own case by saying that the reason that he is still part of the Citizens' Council is because he wants to use his intelligence to make an impact on his hometown of Maycomb and to make money to raise a family. She screams that she could never live with a hypocrite, only to notice that Atticus is standing behind them, smiling.
During a discussion with his daughter, Atticus argues that the blacks of the South are not ready for full civil rights, and the Supreme Court's decision was unconstitutional and irresponsible. Although Jean Louise agrees that the South is not ready to be fully integrated, she says the court was pushed into a corner by the NAACP and had to act. She is confused and devastated by her father's positions as they are contrary to everything he has ever taught her. She returns to the family home furious and packs her things. As she is about to leave town, her uncle comes home. She angrily complains to him, and her uncle slaps her across the face. He tells her to think of all the things that have happened over the past two days and how she has processed them. When she says she can now stand them, he tells her it is bearable because she is her own person. He says that at one point she had fastened her conscience to her father's, assuming that her answers would always be his answers. Her uncle tells her that Atticus was letting her break her idols so that she could reduce him to the status of a human being.
Jean Louise returns to the office and makes a date with Henry for the evening. She reflects that Maycomb has taught him things she had never known and rendered her useless to him except as his oldest friend. She goes to apologize to Atticus, but he tells her how proud of her he is. He hoped that she would stand for what she thinks is right. She reflects that she did not want her world disturbed but that she tried to crush the man who is trying to preserve it for her. Telling him that she loves him very much as she follows him to the car, she silently welcomes him to the human race. For the first time, she sees him as just a man.
Development history
Initially, Go Set a Watchman was promoted by its publisher, and described in media reports, as a sequel to Lee's best-selling novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960, but it is actually the first draft of that novel.[2][15] The novel was finished in 1957[15] and purchased by the J.B. Lippincott Company. Lee's editor, Tay Hohoff, was impressed by elements of the story, and stated that "the spark of the true writer flashed in every line",[15] but she thought that it was by no means ready for publication, being, as she described it, "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel". In his Times article on Hohoff, Jonathan Mahler states that Hohoff thought the strongest aspect of Lee's novel was the flashback sequences featuring a young Scout, which is why she asked Lee to use those flashbacks as a basis for a new novel. Lee agreed, and "during the next couple of years, Hohoff led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled To Kill a Mockingbird."[15]
According to Mahler, "Ms. Hohoff also references a more detailed characterization of the development process, found in the Lippincott corporate history: 'After a couple of false starts, the story-line, interplay of characters, and fall of emphasis grew clearer, and with each revision—there were many minor changes as the story grew in strength and in her own vision of it—the true stature of the novel became evident.' (In 1978, Lippincott was acquired by Harper & Row, which became HarperCollins, publisher of Watchman.)"[15] Mahler remarks that "there appeared to be a natural give and take between author and editor. 'When she disagreed with a suggestion, we talked it out, sometimes for hours,' Ms. Hohoff wrote. 'And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line of controversy.'"[15]
Various theories have been offered as to why the initial characterization of Atticus as a segregationist was dropped in the later novel. Mahler suggests that it could have been Hohoff who inspired the change.[15] Raised "in a multigenerational Quaker home near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Hohoff attended a Quaker school, Brooklyn Friends. Such an upbringing suggests certain progressive values. But probably the clearest window into her state of mind when she was coaching Ms. Lee through the rewrite of Mockingbird is the book she was writing herself at the time: a biography of John Lovejoy Elliott, a social activist and humanist in early-20th-century New York who had committed his life to helping the city's underclass. The book, A Ministry to Man, was published in 1959, one year before Mockingbird."[15]
Michiko Kakutani made note of the changes between the two versions: "Some plot points that have become touchstones in Mockingbird are evident in the earlier Watchman. Scout's older brother, Jem, vividly alive as a boy in Mockingbird, is dead in Watchman; the trial of a black man accused of raping a young white woman ... is only a passing aside in Watchman. (The trial results in a guilty verdict for the accused man, Tom Robinson, in Mockingbird but leads to an acquittal in Watchman.)" She continues, "Students of writing will find Watchman fascinating for these reasons: How did a lumpy tale about a young woman's grief over her discovery of her father's bigoted views evolve into a classic coming-of-age story about two children and their devoted widower father? How did a distressing narrative filled with characters spouting hate speech (from the casually patronizing to the disgustingly grotesque—and presumably meant to capture the extreme prejudice that could exist in small towns in the Deep South in the 1950s) mutate into a redemptive novel associated with the civil rights movement, hailed, in the words of the former civil rights activist and congressman Andrew Young, for giving us 'a sense of emerging humanism and decency'?"[16]
Kakutani also goes on to state that not only are characterizations and plot points different, the motivation behind the novel shifts as well: "Somewhere along the way, the overarching impulse behind the writing also seems to have changed. Watchman reads as if it were fueled by the alienation of a native daughter — who, like Lee, moved away from small-town Alabama to New York City — might feel upon returning home. It seems to want to document the worst in Maycomb in terms of racial and class prejudice, the people's enmity and hypocrisy and small-mindedness. At times, it also alarmingly suggests that the civil rights movement roiled things up, making people who "used to trust each other" now "watch each other like hawks".[16]
According to Kakutani, "Mockingbird, in contrast, represents a determined effort to see both the bad and the good in small-town life, the hatred and the humanity; it presents an idealized father-daughter relationship (which a relative in Watchman suggests has kept Jean Louise from fully becoming her own person) and views the past not as something lost but as a treasured memory. In a 1963 interview, Lee, whose own hometown is Monroeville, Ala., said of Mockingbird: 'The book is not an indictment so much as a plea for something, a reminder to people at home.'"[16]
The papers of Annie Laurie Williams and Maurice Crain, who were Harper Lee's literary agents in the 1950s, are held at Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library. They show that Go Set a Watchman was an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, and underwent significant changes in story and characters during the revision process. Harper Lee was writing Go Set a Watchman in January 1957, and sold the manuscript to the publisher J. B. Lippincott in October 1957. She then continued to work on the manuscript for the next two years, submitting revised manuscripts to her literary agents. At some point in that two-year period, Lee renamed her book To Kill a Mockingbird. Some of these records have been copied and posted online.[17]
Discovery
The manuscript was long thought to have been lost. According to The New York Times, the typed manuscript of Go Set a Watchman was first found, during an appraisal of Lee's assets in 2011, in a safe deposit box in Lee's hometown of Monroeville.[18][19] Lee's lawyer, Tonja Carter, later revealed that she had first assumed the manuscript to be an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. Later, upon learning in the middle of 2014 of the existence of a second novel at a family gathering, she then re-examined Lee's safe-deposit box and found the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman. After contacting Lee and reading the manuscript, she passed it on to Lee's agent, Andrew Nurnberg.
Lee released a statement through her attorney in regards to the discovery:
"In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called Go Set a Watchman. It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout's childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout. I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn't realized it had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years."[20]
Translations
Some translations of the novel have appeared. In the Finnish translation of the novel by Kristiina Drews, "nigger" is translated as if "negro" or "black" had been used. Drews stated that she interpreted what was meant each time, and used vocabulary not offensive to black people.[21]
Controversy
Some publications have called the timing of the book "suspicious", citing Lee's declining health, statements she had made over several decades that she would not write or release another novel, and the death of her sister and caregiver two months before the announcement.[22][23]NPR reported on the news of her new book release, with circumstances "raising questions about whether she is being taken advantage of in her old age".[8] Some publications have even called for fans to boycott the work.[24] News sources, including NPR[8] and BBC News,[25] have reported that the conditions surrounding the release of the book are unclear and posit that Lee may not have had full control of the decision. Investigators for the state of Alabama interviewed Lee in response to a suspicion of elder abuse in relation to the publication of the book.[26] However, by April 2015 the investigation had found that the claims were unfounded.[27]
Historian and Lee's longtime friend Wayne Flynt told the Associated Press that the "narrative of senility, exploitation of this helpless little old lady is just hogwash. It's just complete bunk." Flynt said he found Lee capable of giving consent and believes no one will ever know for certain the terms of said consent.[28]
Marja Mills, author of The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee, a friend and former neighbor of Lee and her sister Alice, had a contrasting perception. In her piece for The Washington Post "The Harper Lee I knew" [9] she quotes Lee's sister Alice, whom she describes as Lee’s "gatekeeper, advisor, protector" for most of Lee's adult life, as saying "Poor Nelle Harper can't see and can't hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence." She makes note that Go Set a Watchman was announced just two and a half months after Alice's death and that all correspondence to and from Lee goes through her new attorney. She describes Lee as "in a wheelchair in an assisted living center, nearly deaf and blind, with a uniformed guard posted at the door" and her visitors "restricted to those on an approved list".[9]
New York Times columnist Joe Nocera continues this argument.[10] He also takes issue with how the book has been promoted by the “Murdoch Empire” as a "Newly discovered" novel, attesting that the other people in the Sotheby's meeting insist that Lee's attorney was present in 2011, when Lee's former agent (whom she subsequently fired) and the Sotheby's specialist found the manuscript. They say she knew full well that it was the same one submitted to Lippencott in the 1950s that was reworked into Mockingbird, and that Carter had been sitting on the discovery, waiting for the moment when she, and not Alice, would be in charge of Harper Lee's affairs.[10] He questions how commentators are treating the character of Atticus as though he were a real person and are deliberately trying to argue that the character evolved with age as opposed to evolved during development of the novel. He quotes Lee herself from one of her last interviews in 1964 where she said, "I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing—is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this—the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea."[10][29] He states that, "a publisher that cared about Harper Lee's legacy would have taken those words to heart, and declined to publish Go Set a Watchman—the good idea that Lee eventually transformed into a gem. That HarperCollins decided instead to manufacture a phony literary event isn't surprising. It's just sad."[10]
Others have questioned the context of the book's release, not in matters of consent, but that it has been publicized as a sequel as opposed to an unedited first draft.[9] There is no foreword to the book, and the dust jacket, although noting that the book was written in the mid-1950s, gives the impression that the book was written as a sequel or companion to Mockingbird, which was never Lee's intention.[9][15] Edward Burlingame, who was an executive editor at Lippincott when Mockingbird was released, has stated that there was never any intention, then or after, on the part of Lee or Hohoff, to publish Go Set a Watchman. It was simply regarded as a first draft.[15] "Lippincott’s sales department would have published Harper Lee’s laundry list", Burlingame said. "But Tay really guarded Nelle like a junkyard dog. She was not going to allow any commercial pressures or anything else to put stress on her to publish anything that wouldn’t make Nelle proud or do justice to her. Anxious as we all were to get another book from Harper Lee, it was a decision we all supported." He said that in all his years at Lippincott, "there was never any discussion of publishing Go Set a Watchman".[15]
Reception
Go Set a Watchman received mixed reviews. According to Book Marks, the book received "positive" reviews based on eight critic reviews with two being "rave" and six being "mixed".[30] On September/October 2015 issue of Bookmarks, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (3.0 out of 5) based on critic reviews with a critical summary saying, "Flashes of Lee's brilliance and humor shine through occasionally, but Go Set a Watchman "has all the markings of a fledgling first novel" (San Francisco Chronicle), including an overly simplistic plot, shaky narration, clunky prose, and long stretches of dull dialogue."[31][32]
Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times described Atticus' characterization as "shocking", as he "has been affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares [Scout's] horror and confusion".[16] Aside from this revelation, Kakutani notes that Go Set a Watchman is the first draft of Mockingbird and discusses how students of writing will find Watchman fascinating for that reason.[16] A reviewer for The Wall Street Journal described the key theme of the book as disillusionment.[33] Despite Atticus' bigotry in the novel, he wins a case similar to the one he loses in To Kill a Mockingbird.[34]Michelle Dean of The Guardian wrote that many reviewers, such as Michiko Kakutani, allowed their personal convictions and takes of the controversy that erupted before the publication to leak into the reviews. She defends the novel as a "pretty honest confession of what it was to grow up a whip-smart, outspoken, thinking white woman in the south... in a word, unpleasant", and stated that the book's bad reception is due to the "[shattering of] everyone's illusions...that Harper Lee was living in satisfied seclusion".[35]
Entertainment Weekly panned the book as "a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird" and said, "Though Watchman has a few stunning passages, it reads, for the most part, like a sluggishly paced first draft, replete with incongruities, bad dialogue, and underdeveloped characters".[36] "Ponderous and lurching", wrote William Giraldi in The New Republic, "haltingly confected, the novel plods along in search of a plot, tranquilizes you with vast fallow patches, with deadening dead zones, with onslaughts of cliché and dialogue made of pamphleteering monologue or else eye-rolling chitchat".[37] On the other hand, Dara Lind of Vox states that "it's ironic that the reception of Go Set a Watchman has been dominated by shock and dismay over the discovery that Atticus Finch is a racist, because the book is literally about Scout — who now goes by her given name, Jean Louise — ...[who] has been living in New York, and quietly assumed that her family back home is just as anti-segregationist as she is".[38] In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik commented that the novel could be seen as "a string of clichés", although he went on to remark that "some of them are clichés only because, in the half century since Lee's generation introduced them, they've become clichés; taken on their own terms, they remain quite touching and beautiful".[39] Maureen Corrigan in NPR Books called the novel "kind of a mess".[40] In The Spectator, Philip Hensher called Go Set a Watchman "an interesting document and a pretty bad novel", as well as a "piece of confused juvenilia".[41] "Go Set A Watchman is not a horrible book, but it's not a very good one, either", judged the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, citing among other flaws its "overly simplistic" plot.[42]
Alexandra Petri wrote in The Washington Post, "It is an inchoate jumble ... Go Set a Watchman is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good, or even a finished book. For the first 100 pages it lacks anything that could even charitably be described as a plot. ... [T]he writing is laughably bad. ... I flung the book down and groaned audibly and I almost did not pick it back up even though I knew I had fewer than 100 pages to go. ... This should not have been published. It’s 280 pages in desperate need of an editor. ... If you were anywhere in the vicinity of me when I was reading the thing, you heard a horrible bellowing noise, followed by the sound of a book being angrily tossed down. ..."[43] Contrastingly, Sam Sacks of The Wall Street Journal praised the book for containing "the familiar pleasures of Ms. Lee’s writing—the easy, drawling rhythms, the flashes of insouciant humor [and] the love of anecdote".[44]
Author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that "Harper Lee was a good writer. She wrote a lovable, greatly beloved book. But this earlier one, for all its faults and omissions, asks some of the hard questions To Kill a Mockingbird evades."[45]
Karen Louise Erdrich is a Native American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in July 1960 and became instantly successful. In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill a Mockingbird has become a classic of modern American literature; a year after its release, it won the Pulitzer Prize. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.
Monroeville is the county seat of Monroe County, Alabama, United States. At the 2020 census its population was 5,951.
Nelle Harper Lee was an American novelist whose 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic of modern American literature. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966). Her second and final novel, Go Set a Watchman, was an earlier draft of Mockingbird, set at a later date, that was published in July 2015 as a sequel.
Matthew Avery Modine is an American actor and filmmaker. He shared the Venice Film Festival‘s Volpi Cup for Best Actor as part of the ensemble cast of Robert Altman film Streamers (1983). He went on to play lead roles in several high-profile films throughout the 1980’s, including include Birdy (1984), Vision Quest (1985), and Married to the Mob (1988). He gained further prominence for playing U.S. Marine J.T. "Joker" Davis in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987).
Mary Badham is an American actress who portrayed Jean Louise "Scout" Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. At the time, Badham was the youngest actress ever nominated in this category.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1962 American coming-of-age legal drama crime film directed by Robert Mulligan starring Gregory Peck and Mary Badham, with Phillip Alford, John Megna, Frank Overton, James Anderson, and Brock Peters in supporting roles. It marked the film debut of Robert Duvall, William Windom, and Alice Ghostley. Adapted by Horton Foote, from Harper Lee's 1960 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, it follows a lawyer (Peck) in Depression-era Alabama defending a black man (Peters) charged with rape while educating his children against prejudice.
Scott Rudin is an American film, television and theatre producer. His films include the Academy Award-winning Best Picture No Country for Old Men, as well as Uncut Gems, Lady Bird, Fences, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Social Network, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, School of Rock, Zoolander, The Truman Show, Clueless, The Addams Family, and eight Wes Anderson films. On Broadway, he has won 17 Tony Awards for shows such as The Book of Mormon, Hello, Dolly!, The Humans, A View from the Bridge, Fences and Passion.
Since the publication ofTo Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, there have been many references and allusions to it in popular culture. The book has been internationally popular for more than a half century, selling more than 30 million copies in 40 languages. It currently (2013) sells 750,000 copies a year and is widely read in schools in America and abroad. Harper Lee and her publisher did not expect To Kill a Mockingbird to be such a huge success. Since it was first published in 1960, it has sold close to one million copies a year and has been the second-best-selling backlist title in the United States. Whether they like the book or not, readers can remember when and where they were the first time they opened the book. Because of this, Mockingbird has become a pillar for students around the country and symbol of justice and the reminiscence of childhood. To Kill a Mockingbird is not solely about the cultural legal practices of Atticus Finch, but about the fatherly virtues he held towards his children and the way Scout viewed him as a father.
Atticus is a brand of clothing founded in 2001 by Blink-182 members Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge, along with their childhood friend Dylan Anderson.
Mary McGarry Morris is an American novelist, short story author and playwright from New England. She uses its towns as settings for her works. In 1991, Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times described Morris as "one of the most skillful new writers at work in America today"; The Washington Post has described her as a "superb storyteller"; and The Miami Herald has called her "one of our finest American writers".
Atticus Finch is a fictional character and the protagonist of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird. A preliminary version of the character also appears in the novel Go Set a Watchman, written in the mid-1950s but not published until 2015. Atticus is a lawyer and resident of the fictional Maycomb County, Alabama, and the father of Jeremy "Jem" Finch and Jean Louise "Scout" Finch. He represents the African-American man Tom Robinson in his trial where he is charged with rape of Mayella Ewell. Through his unwavering dedication to upholding justice and fighting for what is right, Atticus becomes an iconic symbol of moral integrity and justice. Lee based the character on her own father, Amasa Coleman Lee, an Alabama lawyer, who, like Atticus, represented black defendants in a highly publicized criminal trial. Book magazine's list of The 100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900 names Finch as the seventh-best fictional character of 20th-century literature. In 2003, the American Film Institute voted Atticus Finch, as portrayed in an Academy Award–winning performance by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation, as the greatest hero of all American cinema. In the 2018 Broadway stage play adapted by Aaron Sorkin, Finch has been portrayed by various actors including Jeff Daniels, Ed Harris, Greg Kinnear, Rhys Ifans, and Richard Thomas.
Atticus is a murder-mystery novel written by Ron Hansen in 1996. The main character, Atticus Cody, is similar to Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Amasa Coleman Lee was an American newspaper editor, politician, and lawyer. He was the father of acclaimed novelist Harper Lee.
Therese von Hohoff Torrey, better known as Tay Hohoff, was an American literary editor with the publishing firm J. B. Lippincott & Co. Strong-willed and forceful, she worked closely with author Harper Lee over the course of two years to give final shape to her classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird. After the commercial and literary success of the novel, she shielded Harper Lee from the intense pressure to write another one. She retired from a senior editorial position at the firm in 1973 and died the following year.
Alabama literature includes the prose fiction, poetry, films and biographies that are set in or created by those from the US state of Alabama. This literature officially began emerging from the state circa 1819 with the recognition of the region as a state. Like other forms of literature from the Southern United States, Alabama literature often discusses issues of race, stemming from the history of the slave society, the American Civil War, the Reconstruction era and Jim Crow laws, and the US Civil Rights Movement. Alabama literature was inspired by the latter's significant campaigns and events in the state, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Selma to Montgomery marches.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a 2018 play based on the 1960 novel of the same name by Harper Lee, adapted for the stage by Aaron Sorkin. It opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre on December 13, 2018. The play opened in London's West End at the Gielgud Theatre in March 2022. The show follows the story of Atticus Finch, a lawyer in 1930s Alabama, as he defends Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of rape. Varying from the book, the play has Atticus as the protagonist, not his daughter Scout, allowing his character to change throughout the show. During development the show was involved in two legal disputes, the first with the Lee estate over the faithfulness of the play to the original book, and the second was due to exclusivity to the rights with productions using an earlier script by Christopher Sergel. During opening week, the production garnered more than $1.5 million in box office sales and reviews by publications such as the New York Times, LA Times and AMNY were positive but not without criticism.
The Night Watchman is a novel by Louise Erdrich first published on March 3, 2020, by HarperCollins. The novel is set in the 1950s. This is Erdrich's sixth standalone novel following Future Home of the Living God. The novel was inspired by the life of Erdrich's grandfather who motivated and inspired other members of the Turtle Mountain Reservation to resist the Indian termination policies of the 1940s-1960s. The Night Watchman is the first novel that Erdrich has written that is set on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.
Atticus is a masculine name of Greek origin meaning “from Attica.” The name is often used in reference to Atticus Finch, a heroic lawyer who represents an African American man accused of rape by a white woman in a racist Southern United States town in Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Usage of the name continued to increase even after the publication of the 2015 sequel Go Set a Watchman, a novel which presents a more conflicted version of Atticus Finch who also holds racist beliefs. The name has been steadily increasing in usage in the United States. It has been among the top 1,000 names for boys in the United States since 2004 and among the top 300 since 2020.
Reutter, Cheli and Jonathan S. Cullick, editors. Mockingbird Grows Up: Re-Reading Harper Lee Since Go Set a Watchman. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2020.
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