The least interesting thing about an Atlanta lawyer’s new book, “My Father and Atticus Finch,” is whether the lawyer’s father—a white man who represented a black rape defendant in 1930s Alabama—inspired Harper Lee’s beloved character in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Joseph Beck, an intellectual property partner at Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton, writes that in 1992 he inquired about this possibility. Lee replied through her agent that she didn’t recall hearing of Foster Beck’s defense of his appointed client in the town of Troy, about 100 miles from her home in Monroeville. She added, of course, that her novel was fiction.
