Not for nothing did Atticus Finch top the American Film Institute’s 2003 list of the 100 greatest heroes in movie history he was a fount of kindness and a pillar of rectitude all at once. Indeed, for those who have seen Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film adaptation, it’s impossible to hear the name “Atticus Finch” and not visualize Peck with his owlish specs, three-piece suit and unshakable air of father-knows-best. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” Lee famously wrote, though chances are you remember those words being spoken by Gregory Peck. If there’s a reason the performances of Bullock and Keener (who received an Oscar nomination for the role) struck a resonant note, it’s not just that they put a pleasing face on a great literary enigma, but also that they seemed fundamentally true to our public conception of the woman who wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird.” If there was anything one could glean from Lee’s classic 1930s-set Southern parable of racial intolerance and liberal compassion, it’s that its creator was surely a defender of decency, a champion of empathy, and a protector of the misunderstood. Her work, after all, was all that she offered of herself, and it was enough. Her reputation for reclusiveness even earned her comparisons over the years to one of her more memorable creations, Boo Radley - reductive armchair psychoanalysis, perhaps, though in some ways it’s fitting that we should have to return to her work for insights into the life she lived. Over the 56 years between the publication of her own masterwork, “ To Kill a Mockingbird,” and her death last week at 89, Lee was known for steering clear of the limelight as stubbornly as Capote embraced it.

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