Sam Fulwood III: Atticus Finch and Bill Cosby—fallen heroes?

  In what must be the greatest literary shocker of the past century, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman—a companion to the widely read 1961 Pulitzer Prize winner To Kill a Mockingbird—went on sale Tuesday, detonating the sterling reputation of a much beloved and respected fictional hero.

  In Lee’s latest work, Atticus Finch—the stolid, strong-willed white lawyer who, in To Kill a Mockingbird, risked his social standing within a small-minded Alabama town in the 1930s by defending an innocent black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman—is shown to have become an anti-black racist.