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“Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment…. For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God…. His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.” (CCC, 1776).
Welcome to the overview conversation that kicks off the final 2025/26 Studio teachings and before we begin, consider this question:Â Who formed your conscience?
Not who taught you right from wrong, that’s different. I mean who was the person whose moral certainty became your moral certainty? Whose judgment you trusted so completely that you never really had to build your own? A parent. A priest. A teacher. A tradition.
The harder question: What happened, or what would happen, if that person turned out to be wrong? Not wrong about something small. Wrong about something that sits at the very center of what you thought you both believed? Would you leave? Would you stay? Would you even know who you were without them?
Cardinal Newman, one of the great minds of the Catholic tradition, once said he’d drink a toast to the Pope, but conscience first. Conscience first. And to the Pope afterwards.
Harper Lee spent her whole writing life asking that question. And almost nobody knows it because almost nobody has read the book where she asked it. We’re going to fix that in this series of teachings.
The Story Behind the Story
Most people know Harper Lee wrote one novel. To Kill a Mockingbird. Published 1960. Pulitzer Prize 1961. Never out of print. One of the most beloved books in the American canon. What most people don’t know is that she wrote another book first. Go Set a Watchman was the manuscript she brought to her editor at J.B. Lippincott in 1957. It was her first draft. An adult Jean Louise Finch returning home to Maycomb, Alabama and discovering that her father Atticus is not the man she built her entire moral life upon. It is slow. It is raw. It is, in places, almost unbearable to read. And her editor, Tay Hohoff, made one of the most consequential editorial decisions in American literary history.
She told Lee, “The real story isn’t here. The real story is in the flashbacks. That child, Scout, and that father Atticus as she remembers him Go there. Write that story.” And Lee did. She went back. She rewrote for two and a half years. And what emerged was To Kill a Mockingbird one of the most perfectly constructed novels ever written in the English language. Go Set a Watchman went into a vault. Never to be seen. Harper Lee said repeatedly and publicly throughout her life, I have written one book and I will write no other. And that was that. Until it wasn’t.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Publication
Harper Lee had one person in her life who protected her absolutely. Her older sister Alice. A lawyer. Brilliant, fierce, devoted. Alice handled Harper’s affairs, managed her privacy, kept the wolves at bay for decades. Alice Lee died in November 2014. She was 103 years old.
Within months — months — of Alice’s death, a manuscript was suddenly “discovered.” Harper Lee, then 88 years old, deaf, nearly blind, living in an assisted care facility in Monroeville, Alabama, gave her consent to publish. People who knew her well, her friends, former colleagues, people who loved her, expressed serious and documented concern about whether she truly understood what was happening or what she was agreeing to.
Go Set a Watchman was published in July 2015. It sold 1.1 million copies in its first week. Harper Lee died seven months later.
Now. I am not here to render a legal verdict on any of that. But I am here to tell you that as a writer, and as someone who believes the integrity of an artist’s work matters, just hold that context in your hands as you engage with this book. Because what Lee called a first draft, raw, unpolished, and locked away is now sitting on shelves next to the masterpiece she spent her life crafting from it. That changes how we read both books.
Go Set a Watchman is not a sequel. It is not a companion. It is the original sketch. And inside that sketch, as rough and difficult as it is, Harper Lee was working out something she understood so deeply that she hid it in the bones of To Kill a Mockingbird and let the whole world read it without ever knowing what they were really reading.
We are going to find it.
Maycomb, Alabama: The Third Character
Before we go any further I need to introduce you to the most important character in both books. Not Scout. Not Atticus. Not grown-up Jean Louise. It’s Maycomb.
If you took Bones, you’ll remember the teaching on setting worked from Robert McKee’s framework of the four dimensions. Period, Duration, Location, Level of Conflict. And the core conviction that great setting is never neutral. It doesn’t contain the story. It generates it. So in a way, setting becomes destiny.
Maycomb, Alabama is the most perfectly constructed literary setting in American fiction. And Harper Lee uses it as a living force that shapes every character, drives every conflict, and makes certain outcomes not just possible but inevitable.
For example:Â Maycomb in the 1930s, the world of To Kill a Mockingbird, is a small Alabama county seat in the grip of the Great Depression, in the full machinery of Jim Crow, in a heat so thick and slow it feels like time itself has molasses in it. It is a world that has arranged itself very precisely. Everyone knows their place. The Finches, the Cunninghams, the Ewells. Class, race, history all stacked in a careful architecture. And inside that world a child named Scout looks out at all of it with eyes that don’t yet know they’re supposed to see certain things and not others. That child’s eyes are the gift Lee’s editor recognized in the first draft. The child sees clearly precisely because she hasn’t yet been fully formed by Maycomb.
Maycomb in the 1950s, the world of Go Set a Watchman, is the same town twenty years later. The Depression is over. The war has been won. But now Brown v. Board of Education has landed like a stone in still water and the ripples are coming. The NAACP is organizing. Integration is being legislated from Washington. And Maycomb is hardening. The careful architecture is being threatened from outside and the town is doing what it knows how to do. It pulls together, draws the line, resists. Jean Louise returns to this town from New York and the gap between where she has been and where she is standing is the entire engine of the story.
Flannery O’Connor, who understood the South the way you only can when you’ve spent your whole life inside it wrote something that is essential for understanding both books. She observed that what outside observers, Northern liberals, and progressive reformers always missed the extraordinary delicacy of the balance that Southern communities had developed in living together across profound difference. Not justice. She wasn’t claiming justice. But a grammar of coexistence. A set of daily practices, of politeness, of respect, of leaving people alone in the ways that mattered and these moves allowed people who disagreed on fundamental things to still share a town, a street, a life. And her warning was: you do not understand what you are disturbing when you disturb that balance from outside. You do not know what it cost to build. And you will not be there to pay for what breaks when it’s gone.
This is Atticus’s argument in Go Set a Watchman. And it is not a comfortable argument. But it is not a stupid one. And we will give it the serious engagement it deserves when we get there.
The Two Heroes: The One Question
Over the course of these four teachings we are going to live inside two stories that are really one story told twice. Once as raw truth, once as perfected art.
In Go Set a Watchman the hero is Jean Louise Finch. Adult. Returning. Unmoored. She is in many ways the most difficult protagonist in American literature. Prickly, self-righteous, and absolutely certain she is right. And the story is going to put her through something that will either destroy her or make her, for the first time in her life, a person with her own conscience.
In To Kill a Mockingbird the hero is Atticus Finch. Father. Lawyer. Moral witness. The man through whose example an entire generation of readers learned what it looks like to do the right thing for the right reason in a world that will punish you for it.
And here is the question that threads through all four teachings and the question Harper Lee was asking from the very first page of the very first draft: Is the conscience you are living by actually yours? Or did you borrow it from your father, your culture, your politics, or your traditions? And did you mistake the borrowing for the building? Because there is a difference. A borrowed conscience is fragile. It shatters when the person, or institution you borrowed it from turns out to be human or created by humans. A formed conscience, the kind the Catholic tradition has been thinking about for two thousand years, the kind Cardinal Newman was toasting, the kind Jean Louise Finch is about to have forced upon her. That conscience holds. Not because it’s certain. But because it has been tested.
Maycomb is the testing ground. These two books are the test
Here is your map for this series:
Teaching One: We open with Go Set a Watchman. We learn its world. We let McKee’s four dimensions of setting show us what Maycomb in the 1950s is doing to everyone who lives there. What the period demands. What the location produces. And what the level of conflict makes unavoidable.
Teaching Two: We go deep into the plot of Go Set a Watchman. We follow Jean Louise through her shattering and out the other side. We name what is actually happening to her conscience with the precision the Catholic tradition gives us for this. And we ask what her story has to say to a world that has forgotten the difference between cutting ties and growing up.
Teaching Three: We open with To Kill a Mockingbird. Same town. Twenty years earlier. Seen through a child. And we watch what Lee’s editor saw, that the real story was always here, in those streets, in that heat, in those eyes that didn’t yet know what they were looking at.
Teaching Four: We follow Atticus through the Tom Robinson trial. We name his heroism precisely, not as victory but as witness. We find the bones of Go Set a Watchman inside To Kill a Mockingbird and watch what Lee preserved and what she transformed. And we ask the final question: which Atticus is real? The one Scout sees, or the one Jean Louise sees twenty years later?
The answer is going to surprise you. And it is going to be one of the most important things you’ve thought about in a long time.
Let’s begin, J.
I first read Go Set A Watchman a couple of months after it was published in 2015. Like many other people of my generation, I idolized Atticus Finch after reading To Kill A Mockingbird when I was a teenager. I hated GSAW for smashing my illusions. I told friends it was badly written and definitely not worth their time. I didn’t know it’s history or any context that this Blackbird Lesson #57 has illuminated.
I asked myself no questions.
–Which Atticus is the real one?
–Who guided ME in forming a conscience?
These questions interest me. I thought I would not like GSAW any better this time around but one-quarter into the book, I’m stunned by her descriptions of being on the train and remembering her family and Maycomb. Atticus hasn’t entered the story yet.
I wanted to answer the second question that Blackbird asked. Where did my conscience come from?
Both my parents were what would be called Progressive Democrats today. My mother, raised in the South by wealthy Republicans, was considered a rebel, a traitor, an outsider. She went to college in the North and never returned to her roots—either physically or emotionally. My father was the third child born into an impoverished immigrant Russian Jew family living in Brooklyn.
As I grew, they were both activists fighting for equality, single payer Healthcare for all, and democracy. At the same time, they wanted the best education for their two daughters. My father’s job as a college professor in Political Science caused us to live in a wealthy Republican area of the western Philadelphia suburbs until I was sixteen. There I was the outsider and I resented being put in that position.
Both parents had rejected religion—having lived through WWI, the Depression, and WWII. They agreed, however, to expose their daughters to something religious and we could make our own choices later. The family became Quakers when I was eight years old. The summer I turned ten, I went to a two-month summer camp based on Quaker principles. I attended most summers until I was twenty-four. Initially because I was sent and later by choice.
That camp, Farm and Wilderness, more than anything else, formed my early consciousness. Our daily morning of worship was outdoors or sitting on our bunks in the three-sided cabins that was our home in July and August. We were encouraged to go to the camp library and seek out “prayers” and sayings to share. “Organized” religion, for me, equaled nature, poetry, seeking to express the wonder and gratitude of our surroundings. It included physical activity, singing, and teamwork. Not all of it stuck but was what I aspired to even if I felt miles from ever achieving it.
It was difficult bringing the comfort and certainty of those two months back to living with my family on the Main Line during the academic year. My mother was always angry, presenting her ideas of fairness in the world with her fists up, ready to fight. My father, more of a people pleaser, managed to present his views without pissing people off. In their marriage, my father validated and encouraged my mother’s thinking, her beliefs as a woman and to others she seemed way ahead of her time. My mother, disciplined and focused, helped organize my father’s ideas into writing. Much later in life, I understood “the woman behind the man…..”
As I grew into my twenties, it never occurred to me that I couldn’t do something because I was a woman. In 1974, I applied for and received a credit card when I started Grad School. I couldn’t comprehend other women saying that they were refused or wouldn’t apply because they knew that it was useless.
Once when I was a junior in High School, a black boy asked me to the first dance of the academic year. I said Yes but I really wanted to go with the boy I had a crush on. My mother took me aside and told me I should not go with Bill, my friend who was Black. That it might hurt my reputation, and I was brand new in the school. I was secretly thrilled. I broke the date and went with my crush. But I called her a hypocrite saying she believed one thing but advised me to do the opposite. It never occurred to me that she might have struggled, putting my welfare before her beliefs. I don’t know as we never discussed it.
My father taught me, by example, to always fight for the underdog. I don’t know how that developed in his consciousness, but I suspect he felt it only fair to even the odds.
Looking back over the years, I knew right from wrong from a young age. I knew what was fair—cried at the end of every episode of Bonanza because fairness won out—good over evil. I would voice what I believed, tentative when I was young, but I was always a follower. My convictions were never strong enough to risk being a leader. What if someone didn’t like me? But watching Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird or Spenser Tracy in Judgement at Nuremburg, I wanted what they had: always to follow my conscience no matter the consequences.
This is extraordinary. You went back to the book. You traced the formation. You named the contradiction with your mother which took real courage and you held it with more grace than you may realize. She was not a hypocrite. She was a woman doing what women in that world had to do, protecting you inside a reality she was simultaneously fighting to change. That is not failure. That is the cost of living in the middle of something unfinished.
And the longing you named at the end, wanting what Atticus had, always to follow your conscience no matter the consequences. That is not a small thing. That is the whole question. And you have been living inside it your whole life.
Keep reading.