A black man is charged with raping a white woman in a small Alabama town in the 1930s.
A well-respected white lawyer from the area agrees to defend him, despite knowing it could prove an unpopular decision in that part of the segregated South.
Despite almost no evidence of guilt, the all-white jury votes to convict. And the lawyer’s life is indelibly changed by the experience.
What sounds like the stuff of beloved fiction — Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” — was actually Foster Beck’s real-life storyline. And now his son, Atlanta attorney Joseph Madison Beck, has written a memoir about him and the issues that helped shape the outcome of that case, the South and its literature.
“I’m not claiming (Harper Lee) used that story for her story,” said Beck, whose book, “My Father & Atticus Finch,” will be released next month by W.W. Norton & Company. During an exchange of letters years ago, Lee said she didn’t recall hearing about Foster Beck’s case. “I just say at the end it’s nice that Alabama can be proud of Harper Lee’s fictional story and my father’s true story.”
You could also say Harper Lee is in the literary air right now. Again.
"Go Set a Watchman," Lee's second novel (which she actually wrote first), was released in paperback on Tuesday. In its first week of publication last July, the hardcover version sold over 1 million copies and sparked a fair amount of anguish over its alternate depiction of "To Kill a Mockingbird's" heroic Atticus Finch as an aging racist who attended Klan meetings and was against desegregation.
Last week, literary biographer Charles J. Shields released an updated version of "Mockingbird," his best-selling 2006 book about Lee, who died in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., in February at the age of 89.
The famously closemouthed Lee didn't cooperate with either version of Shields' book. Still, about a third of its material is new: from the lengthy editing process that helped transform "Watchman" into "To Kill a Mockingbird"; to the mysterious discovery of the "Watchman" manuscript a few years ago, to Lee's rather prickly relationship with Monroeville late in her life.
“I thought, ‘The story obviously doesn’t stop at 2006,’” Shields said. “It goes on.”
The book immediately made news with its revelation that Lee had written an unbylined article about a Kansas murder investigation for the March 1960 issue of the Grapevine magazine. Lee was helping her friend, Truman Capote, research what would eventually become his book, "In Cold Blood." Shields believes the article was meant to warn off other potential book writers.
"They were putting stakes in the ground, making it clear, 'This is our turf,'" Shields said of the long lost article, which Smithsonian.com published this week (the Grapevine's contents are confidential to members of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI). "The other thing that article shows is that Harper Lee could've had a successful career as a journalist."
And while he’s more severe on the literary merits of “Go Set a Watchman” — “She’s heavy on summary and exposition to the detriment of the story unfolding,” he writes — he’s happy it was published when it was.
“Through some sort of cosmic design, that book came out during that terrible summer of the Charleston shootings, when the true cause of the Civil War came to the fore again and the 30-year controversy over the Confederate flag came to a head,” Shields said by phone from his Virginia home. “I think ‘Go Set a Watchman’ is much more valuable as a contemporary document. What Atticus talked about was on the lips of every white Southerner in the 1950s.”
For Beck, it’s largely coincidental that the book he’d worked on “for years” is coming out so close on the heels of “Watchman.” Yet it may have ended up imbuing it with yet another level of meaning.
“I had to revise the premise to say that there were the Atticuses of ‘Mockingbird’ and ‘Watchman’ and all kinds of variations of that in the South at the time,” said Beck, senior counsel at Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton. “And that my father was like the Atticus of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’”
