My Father and Atticus Finch
Like almost everyone else in the U.S., Atlanta attorney Joseph Madison Beck had read To Kill a Mockingbird, and he decided in 1992 to satisfy his curiosity about the similarity between the novel and an episode in his own family history. He wrote to author Harper Lee: Did she know about his white father’s legal defense of an African-American man accused of raping a white woman in 1938, not far from where Lee was then growing up in south Alabama? No, Lee wrote back politely; though she could see there were “obvious parallels,” she didn’t recall the case at all.
