My Father and Atticus Finch

As a child, Joe Beck heard about his fathers legacy: Foster Beck had once been a respected trial lawyer who defied the unspoken code of 1930s Alabama by defending a black man charged with raping a white woman. A lawyer himself, Beck became intrigued by the similarities between his fathers story and Harper Lees iconic novel. Beck reconstructs his fathers role in the 1938 trialmuch publicised when Harper Lee was twelve years oldin which the examining doctor testified before a hostile courtroom that there was no evidence of intercourse or violence. Nevertheless, the all-white jury voted to convict. This riveting memoir explores how race, class and the memory of the American Souths defeat in the Civil War produced the trials outcome and how these issues compare with the American literary imagination.