Atticus Finch — To Kill a Mockingbird

Atticus Finch was for decades the defining ideal of the American moral hero: a small-town Alabama lawyer who defends a Black man falsely accused of rape in the Jim Crow South. Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman (2015) revealed a later Atticus sympathetic to segregationists, challenging whether any character can bear the moral weight readers impose. This re-evaluation sparked a 70% increase in scholarly critiques of his legacy, making him the most debated moral character of the 20th century.