John T. Matthews, “To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman, and the ‘Discovery’ of Racism”

February 3, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Early last summer came the surprising news that Harper Lee was about to publish a second novel, more than half a century after her iconic To Kill a Mockingbird had appeared in 1960. Mockingbird, the story of a young girl’s initiation into the reality of Southern racism, is among the most cherished coming-of-age stories in American literary culture, and its portrait of the noble Atticus Finch, a lawyer who risks everything to defend a black man falsely accused of a crime in the segregated South of the 1930s, has inspired generations of admirers. For all its defense of such fundamental democratic principles, however, Mockingbird also has been criticized for its narrowing of questions of racial justice to a drama of white conscience, of historical change to a matter of individual attitude. Harper Lee took several years to revise the original draft of the novel that eventually appeared as To Kill a Mockingbird. Her original manuscript, entitled “Go Set a Watchman,” was known to exist, but only recently did the author agree to its publication after it was rediscovered in her papers. In this lecture, John T. Matthews will discuss with audience members how this “new” work alters our understanding of what Lee wanted to say about the racial crisis in the U.S. South during the decades of the modern civil rights movement.