Review Essay: Joseph Crespino's Atticus Finch: The Biography

In Atticus Finch: The Biography Joseph Crespino has given us a brilliant, readable historian’s rumination on the making of a literary icon. How did Harper Lee conceive of Atticus? What were the subtleties in her own understanding of this most iconic of fictional characters, and how did Atticus capture our hearts and imagination as he did? These are the questions Crespino addresses, and I was surprised at the depth of personal reflection this book prompted. I was thirteen when my father gave me a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. This was 1960 and the book had just appeared, and in my own Alabama family--with roots in the county where Harper Lee was born---Mockingbird carried its share of controversy. One of my aunts refused to read it, so offended was she by its revelations of racial injustice. My father was a different story. Like Atticus, he was a lawyer who believed that the courts, alone among human institutions, were “the great leveler,” and when he was elected as a circuit judge in the year of Mockingbird’s publication, he had promised Black voters that his courtroom would be colorblind. But in our family all of this was a delicate dance, for my father was also a segregationist, deeply