One of the many strokes of genius of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird – our greatest American novel – is to make a child, Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, the narrator. We see the South, that is, 1930s Maycomb (Monroeville), Alabama, through a child’s penetrating stare. In Harper Lee’s much heralded and equally maligned second novel Go Set a Watchman, twenty-six-year-old Scout returns home from her sojourn in New York to visit her aging father, small town lawyer Atticus.
Many have condemned the publication of Go Set a Watchman as a brutal defamation of our beloved Atticus Finch or as an unedited, sloppy novel that detracts from the reputation of Harper Lee. While Go Set a Watchman lacks the literary perfection of her first novel, I am bold to believe that Watchman, particularly when read in the context of Mockingbird, confirms the artistic genius of Lee. She has said that she wants to be our Jane Austin. In writing Watchman, Lee is all that and even more.
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