Watchman was written years before To Kill a Mockingbird on her editor’s suggestion, Lee expanded a flashback to Scout’s childhood into a separate novel and set the other book aside. Why did Lee give a treasured character, one half of American literature’s best sibling relationship, such a seemingly tossed-off death? It’s important to remember that when Lee was writing Go Set a Watchman, she had no idea her characters would become icons - neither Jem nor Scout nor Atticus existed outside her own head.
May you touch the sides of spooky houses all throughout eternity.
Poor Jem! Dead before he reached adulthood, dead before he could fulfill his dream of following in Atticus’s footsteps. Just about that time, Jean Louise’s brother dropped dead in his tracks one day, and after the nightmare of that was over, Atticus, who had always thought of leaving his practice to his son, looked around for another young man Near the end of the first chapter of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, after the grown-up Jean Louise “Scout” Finch has made her way by train back to Maycomb County, comes a throwaway mention of the fate of a beloved literary character, one who, in this telling, doesn’t even get a name:
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