OPINION: ‘Atticus Finch’ tackles tough questions about an American icon
Like generations of American children before me and most likely after me, I met Atticus in the “tired old town” of Maycomb, Alabama, through a required reading assignment. In Maycomb, rainy weather turned the streets to red slop and grass grew on the sidewalks.
The world of “To Kill a Mockingbird” seeped into my imagination. I don’t remember seeing the film, but somehow, if I close my eyes and imagine Atticus Finch’s face, it is Gregory Peck’s I see. As a middle schooler, I saw myself in the plucky, question-asking tomboy Jean Louise (Scout), who author Harper Lee based on herself.
In Joseph Crespino’s “Atticus Finch: The Biography,” we meet Harper Lee unable to visit her father on his birthday in the small town of Monroeville, Alabama, Maycomb’s real-life counterpart. Crespino has written a nuanced biography, one that tells the twin stories of Harper Lee’s development of the character Atticus Finch and her relationship and ideological struggles with her father Amasa Coleman (A.C.) Lee, the Alabama lawyer and newspaperman, on whom Harper Lee based the fictional Atticus.