If you somehow haven’t heard, Harper Lee’s controversial novel, Go Set a Watchman, is the revealing origin of To Kill a Mockingbird, involving the same central characters and small town setting. Lee wrote Watchman in the mid-1950s, which is when the novel is set, but, instead of publishing it, her editor directed her to focus on developing the “flashback” scenes, those that depicted events twenty years earlier when the protagonist was a young girl. The result was the distinct novel, Mockingbird, set in the 1930s and published in 1960. The lawyer Atticus Finch is the only main character who is an adult in both novels, in his early fifties in Mockingbird and early seventies in Watchman. Discussions of Watchman invariably raise the question of whether there is anything in Mockingbird that prepares the reader for the older Atticus’ racially reactionary politics or whether they are even really the same character. I find myself disagreeing with most of the commentary. Atticus is both worse and better than various observers think. History has more to say about both judgments than has been understood.

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