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Joseph Madison Beck

Biography

Joseph Madison Beck

Joseph Madison Beck is an Atlanta attorney. He also teaches at Emory Law School and has lectured at universities throughout the United States and abroad.

Joseph Madison Beck

Books by Joseph Madison Beck

by Joseph Madison Beck - Memoir, Nonfiction

As a child, Joseph Beck heard about his father’s 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. Now a lawyer himself, Beck has become intrigued by the similarities between his father’s story and the one at the heart of Harper Lee’s iconic novel. This riveting memoir seeks to understand how race, class and the memory of the South’s defeat in the Civil War produced the trial’s outcome, and how these issues figure into our literary imagination.