Atticus Finch — To Kill a Mockingbird

Atticus Finch — the small-town Alabama lawyer who defends a Black man falsely accused of rape in the Jim Crow South — was for decades the defining ideal of the American moral hero: principled, calm, courageous in the face of communal pressure. Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman (2015), revealing a later Atticus sympathetic to segregationists, provoked an extraordinary re-evaluation of whether any character can bear the moral weight readers impose on them.