“You Who Called Me Scout are Dead and in Your Grave”: Fathers and Daughters in Go Set a Watchman and to Kill a Mockingbird

Abstract

“More than half a century after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), news of a second novel from Harper Lee turned the 2015 emergence of Go Set a Watchman into an international literary event. Although marketed as a sequel to Mockingbird, Watchman was written in the mid-1950s and represented Lee’s first attempt at a novel. Subsequently set aside, it nonetheless provided the author with some of the key elements that would eventually feature in Mockingbird, not least through its focus on the Finch family and the small town of Maycomb, Alabama. For devotees of Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Watchman was clearly a tantalizing prospect, and, although some doubted whether Lee had been able to consent to publication, readers and critics alike recognized that a reading of Watchman and Mockingbird in tandem might lead to a better understanding of Lee’s artistic development. Certainly, for one such critic, Watchman inspired a renewed appreciation of Lee’s subsequent achievement: