Go Set A Watchman By Harper Lee: A Literary Analysis

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“You are too young to understand it,’ she said, ‘but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of—oh, of your father’… ‘There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.” (Lee, 1960, p. 60). Harper Lee grew up in Alabama, a state that, according to Anderson, was made famous during the civil rights movement (Anderson, 2007). An excerpt from a Discovering Artists periodical, titled “Nell Harper Lee,” conveys that although her most famous books, To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman are considered fiction, being exposed to racism, prejudice, and injustice as a child greatly …show more content…
According to Maureen Corrigan, a writer for NPR, the novel takes place in the mid-1950s, and follows some of the same characters, showing Atticus at age 72 being crippled by arthritis, as well as a traveling, 26-year-old Scout Finch (Corrigan, 2015). The plot revolves around Scout as an Adult returning to Maycomb, and Atticus revealing himself as a being corrupted with some of the same flaws he was fighting in To Kill a Mockingbird, as Corrigan stated “Atticus reveals himself as a segregationist and a reactionary extremist. He's a staunch proponent of states' rights, a critic of federal programs, even popular ones like Social Security and the G.I. Bill, and a foe of the NAACP” (Corrigan, 2015). Views that readers hold on Go Set a Watchman vary a great degree, as seen by the National Endowment for the Humanities saying that Lee may have been making a reference to the impending fall of a pre-civil rights society (Nituama, 2015) and Corrigan saying “Go Set a Watchman is a kind of mess that will forever change the way we read a masterpiece” (Corrigan, …show more content…
Lee’s writing delves into subjects that could be considered ineffable—such as Christianity, alcoholism, racism, prejudice, and the nature of humanity—but she does in such an informal, and often innocent, manner that her words have the ability to be thought-provoking to readers of all ages. Nelle Harper Lee was an American writer whose novels influenced America’s culture, helped the civil rights movement, and inspired millions of

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