Few recent events in the history of American fiction have sparked such tumultuous debate as the publication this summer of Harper Lee’s novel “Go Set a Watchman.” A sequel (of sorts) to Lee’s beloved 1961 book “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Watchman tells the story of a grown-up Jean Louise “Scout” Finch’s return to her small hometown in Alabama from the liberated milieu of mid-20th-century Manhattan. Many lovers of “To Kill a Mockingbird” have felt betrayed by how “Go Set a Watchman” reimagines some of the earlier books’s central characters: most notably, Atticus Finch, the principled Southern lawyer whose stand against Jim Crow-era bigotry has inspired generations of readers—and propelled some into the legal profession.
Ironically, just days before Watchman was published, the winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction was announced, to considerably less media attention. Unlike “Go Set a Watchman,” author Deborah Johnson’s novel “The Secret of Magic” hews closely to the themes of Lee’s original classic, telling the story of one lawyer’s fight for racial justice in the pre-civil rights era South.
