Re-Introducing Harper Lee and the Real Atticus Finch

It was a first draft. Go Set A Watchman, which sold a record-breaking million-plus copies when it was published in July, and this week won the Goodreads Choice Awards of 2015 for fiction, was, essentially, Harper Lee’s first draft of her American classic To Kill A Mockingbird.

In Go Set A Watchman, Atticus Finch is not the American hero we thought we knew. He is not the man who used these words to express the importance of empathy and tolerance to his daughter Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Many of us could not understand how that Atticus Finch could be the Atticus Finch of Go Set A Watchman, a segregationist who spouted racist ideas and joined a White Citizens Council akin to the Ku Klux Klan. Huffington Post