Turning this hero into a racist is an epic blunder: As To Kill A Mockingbird author's new novel reveals a disturbing twist, one life-long fan has a warning 

• Pulitzer-prize winning author Harper Lee has shocked fans with new book
• Mockingbird hero Atticus Finch inspired countless equality campaigners  
• But Harper Lee's new book reveals the revered protagonist to be a racist
• Manuscript was submitted 55 years ago, but it will be published tomorrow

By Emily Rhodes For The Daily Mail

Published: 19:27 EST, 12 July 2015 | Updated: 20:29 EST, 12 July 2015

Until now, author Harper Lee has been a one-hit wonder. But what a hit it was. Her novel To Kill A Mockingbird, published in 1960, has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide and won the Pulitzer Prize.

With his driving moral force, its hero, Atticus Finch — a white lawyer who defends a wrongly accused black man in the Deep South of the Thirties — has inspired countless equality campaigners from the U.S. chat-show host Oprah Winfrey to the director of the Liberty organisation Shami Chakrabati.

However, this might all be about to change as the revered protagonist has been dramatically revealed to be a racist who once attended a white supremacist meeting.

Tomorrow sees the much-hyped publication of Go Set A Watchman, the original manuscript which Harper Lee submitted to her editor before To Kill A Mockingbird. Lee thought it ‘a pretty decent effort’, but her editor — captivated by the flashbacks to Atticus’s daughter Scout’s childhood — persuaded her to write a new novel from the point of view of the young girl. 

Transformed hero: Revered lawyer Atticus Finch, the protagonist of Harper Lee's Pulitzer prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, is transformed into a racist in Lee's second novel, Go Set a Watchman, which will be published tomorrow. Here, the character is played by Gregory Peck in the iconic 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird

Author: Harper Lee is reported to have said that she is 'humbled and amazed' that the book is to be published now, 55 years after she first submitted the manuscript to her publisher

So this reworked version metamorphosed into To Kill A Mockingbird, and the original incarnation was, until last year, thought to be lost.

Who knows the real reason for the decision to publish Go Set A Watchman now, 55 years later?

Harper Lee, aged 89 and in an assisted living facility in New York, is famously reclusive about her masterpiece. Having turned down interviews since 1964, she refused to write an introduction, claiming the book ‘has managed to survive the years without preamble’.

So it is hard to believe that she would be keen for the publication of what is essentially a book-length introduction.

Lee has reportedly said she is ‘humbled and amazed this will be published after all these years’, but it seems to go against her character to be dragged back into the limelight she has avoided for so long.

However, one thing is sure: her publishers must have been delighted by the discovery of the original manuscript, which Lee’s lawyer apparently stumbled across last year, with dollar signs in their eyes. Here was the potential to double Harper Lee’s literary output.

New release: Harper Lee's second novel, Go Set a Watchman, is to be published tomorrow amid much hype. But fans could be shocked by the transformation of much-loved lawyer Atticus Finch into a racist

Not only does this manuscript, which is being marketed as a sequel, have ‘sure-fire hit’ written all over it, the publicity has also caused a huge spike in sales for To Kill A Mockingbird.

In an industry that loves the easy money of sequels — witness Grey, the Fifty Shades Of Grey spin-off, as well as newly commissioned James Bond, Sherlock Holmes and Jeeves & Wooster books — a follow-up to such a well-loved classic must have seemed like a dream come true.

Indeed, though some Mockingbird fans are threatening to boycott the new release, HarperCollins claims pre-orders for Watchman are the highest in company history, while Amazon has announced they are the strongest since the final Harry Potter instalment. The plan may yet backfire, though. As one wit on Twitter put it: ‘Atticus Finch as a segregationist? It’s like finding out Santa Claus beats his reindeer.’

The bombshell emerged this weekend in an embargo-breaking review of Go Set A Watchman in The New York Times, which revealed that Atticus Finch is not the hero readers fell for in Mockingbird, but ‘a racist who once attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting’, and who says such things as ‘the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people’.

He also asks his daughter: ‘Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theatres? Do you want them in our world?’

Elsewhere, Atticus calls pro- segregation councils ‘a sort of warning to the Negroes for them not to be in such a hurry’.

He also says: ‘Now think about this . . . what would happen if all the Negroes in the South were suddenly given full civil rights? I’ll tell you. There’d be another Reconstruction. Would you want your state governments run by people who don’t know how to run ’em? We’re outnumbered, you know.’

It is a far cry from the beloved Atticus Finch of To Kill A Mockingbird.

Set in the fictional Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression, that book is tomboy Scout’s story of the time her widowed father — the small-town lawyer Atticus Finch — is appointed to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, who has been accused of raping a young white woman.

Atticus agrees to take on the case, despite the resulting racial abuse against him and his family. He tells Scout that courage is ‘when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what’.

During the trial, Atticus makes it clear Tom Robinson is not guilty, but the jury convicts him anyway.

Atticus Finch is naturally seen as a deeply moral figure for the way he stands up to the prevailing racist attitudes of the Deep South.

His iconic status as a great literary hero was further cemented by Gregory Peck’s portrayal in the 1962 film adaptation.

Iconic: Gregory Peck playing the deeply moral character of Atticus Finch, in the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. The character has been named as inspiration for a number of human rights campaigners, including U.S.-chat show host Oprah Winfrey

Cast: Mary Badham (left) pictured as Scout, with Gregory Peck (centre) as Atticus Finch, and Phillip Alford as Jem, in a scene from the film adapted from the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, directed by Robert Mulligan

Harper Lee's home town excited for second novel (archive)

Among his many inspiring, memorable pieces of advice is: ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’

How terrible, then, for it to come to light that in this earlier incarnation, Atticus had no interest in climbing into a black person’s skin, but he was just as racist as the rest of Maycomb’s residents.

As far as literary scandals go, it couldn’t get much worse.

Publisher HarperCollins, anticipating concerns that readers may be disillusioned, has said: ‘The question of Atticus’s racism is one of the most important and critical elements in this novel, and it should be considered in the context of the book’s broader moral themes.

‘Go Set A Watchman explores racism and changing attitudes in the South during the Fifties in a bold and unflinching way.

‘At its heart, it is the coming-of-age story of a young woman who struggles to reconcile the saintly figure of her beloved father with her own, more enlightened views.’

Yet some would argue that this new portrayal of Atticus Finch is, in fact, the more realistic representation.

Veteran African-American civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton says the Atticus of Go Set A Watchman ‘reflects the reality of finding out that a lot of those we thought were on our side harboured some personal different feelings’.

Evidently, the Atticus of Mockingbird was too good to be true.

It is somewhat ironic that the hero of one of America’s favourite coming-of-age novels has forced the nation into a coming-of-age moment as it confronts this more condemning portrait of its past.

Though the U.S. has its first black president in Barack Obama, there are widespread concerns race relations have slipped back in recent years.

Currently, the country is riven by debate over the race issue after the shooting in South Carolina of nine black churchgoers by a 21-year-old white man.

Only the first chapter of Go Set A Watchman is available, so the other developments to Mockingbird’s characters and ideas remain to be seen. But we do know it follows 26-year-old Scout as she returns to her Alabama home-town from New York to visit her ailing father.

Essentially, it was what Harper Lee would have published without a stern editor on hand to guide her towards Mockingbird instead.

Crucially, the new book will demonstrate how editors are the unsung heroes of publishing. They have enormous and vital input into the book, but their names never appear on the cover: at best they are hidden in the author’s acknowledgements, at worst they are absent.

Famously, William Golding’s editor rescued the manuscript that would become Lord Of The Flies from the reject pile, where it lay with a covering note from a Faber & Faber reader dismissing it as ‘rubbish & dull’ and ‘pointless’.

Luckily, young editorial recruit Charles Monteith saw its potential. Golding made many changes, thanks to Monteith’s suggestions.

The pair went through 19 titles, before Golding’s original Strangers From Within found its final fit with Monteith’s Lord Of The Flies.

If the publishers were to publish Golding’s original manuscript, perhaps we, too, might dismiss it as ‘rubbish and dull’ without the editor Monteith’s many improving changes.

Tomorrow, I will be one of the many thousands rushing to buy and read Go Set A Watchman, but I fear it will only go to show that in all too many cases, reading a book prior to the work of a good editor is essentially, as that Faber & Faber reader said, ‘pointless’.

But, more importantly, it will be a tragedy if a character who for generations has been one of the most unambiguously heroic figures in American literature is tarnished because he was originally conceived as a segregationist.

There are so few true heroes these days that we need to protect those that we do have.

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