How a cover was found for Go Set A Watchman

As a result, Lee turned Finch into a noble character who would put his career at stake to defend a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman. Of maybe he was a segregationist and a bigot after he was that ideal man. It depends on which timeline you use.

Its release comes 55 years after Lee’s only other published work, “To Kill a Mockingbird“, a classic story of racial injustice in the American South. She’s been away from the public eye since “Mockngbird’s” 1962 Oscar-winning film adaptation of the same title, which starred Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch.

Harper Lee’s unexpected new novel “Go Set A Watchman” has become the fastest selling book in the history of publisher HarperCollins, with more than 1.1 million copies sold in North America in the first week, the company said on Monday.

The book’s older, more disillusioned tone – specifically its depiction of Mockingbird’s hero Atticus as a flawed man with racist views – has left some readers shocked. Before. After. The whole thing is confusing on a number of levels. Yes, Atticus Finch is depicted as a segregationist, but then he always was. “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters?”

Too many people today, like Jean Louise Finch, are convinced that they are so morally right, so certain, they don’t have to listen to or even try to understand different views. People are asking the question, “How far have we advanced since the bad old days of Jim Crow, or have we advanced at all?”