Professor Joseph Crespino will discuss his acclaimed new book Atticus Finch: The Biography, on Sunday at 2 P.M., 5 August 2018 at D.G.Wills Books, 7461 Girard Avenue, La Jolla, 858-456-1800, www.dgwillsbooks.com. Who was Atticus Finch? The publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2015 forever changed how we think about Atticus Finch. Once seen as a paragon of decency, he was reduced to a small-town racist. How are we to understand this transformation? In Atticus Finch, historian Joseph Crespino draws on exclusive sources to reveal how Harper Lee's father provided the central inspiration for each of her books. A lawyer and newspaperman, A. C. Lee was a principled opponent of mob rule, yet he was also a racial paternalist. Harper Lee created the Atticus of Watchman out of the ambivalence she felt toward white southerners like him. But when a militant segregationist movement arose that mocked his values, she revised the character in To Kill a Mockingbird to defend her father and to remind the South of its best traditions. A story of family and literature amid the upheavals of the twentieth century, Atticus Finch is essential to understanding Harper Lee, her novels, and her times. "A thoughtful, fascinating study offering fresh revelations and insights about To Kill a Mockingbird.... Atticus Finch is a valuable new key to the mystery that is Ms. Lee."―Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Carry Me Home "To Kill a Mockingbird was a publishing sensation in its day, a staple of school reading lists for decades, and an enduring lens for understanding the politics of civil rights. Joe Crespino's smart and highly readable 'biography' of Atticus Finch gives us the story behind the story, from Harper Lee's family history to her emergence as a writer to her later fame. In so doing, he recaptures the lost diversity and complexity of thought and the perspectives about race and integration not just in midcentury America but within the white South itself."―David Greenberg, author of Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency Joseph Crespino is the Jimmy Carter Professor of history at Emory University. He is the author of In Search of Another Country, winner of the 2008 Lillian Smith Book Award from the Southern Regional Council, and Strom Thurmond's America.