Only Jesus made his father more famous. Harper Lee’s father was actually named Amasa, but, by the end of his life, he was answering to “Atticus Finch,” a reflection of how closely the character was modelled on him and how wildly well known his fictional doppelgänger had become. When “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published, in 1960, it instantly—and seemingly irrevocably—entered the canon of American literature; it won the Pulitzer Prize, was adapted into an Oscar-winning film, sold tens of millions of copies in more than forty languages, and was eventually assigned to half a century’s worth of middle-school students—some of whom were themselves named Atticus, or had pets named for his daughter, Scout, or her friend Dill, or their strange neighbor, Boo Radley.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is now a kind of secular scripture, one of only a handful of texts most Americans have in common. This fall, millions of viewers voted it the nation’s “most beloved novel” on the PBS show “The Great American Read,” the literary equivalent of “American Idol.” That was long after Oprah Winfrey had already anointed it “our national novel.” Superlatives follow the book around like shadows, the longest of which is cast by the character of Atticus, the small-town lawyer who defends a black man, Tom Robinson, falsely accused of raping a white woman named Mayella Ewell.

Fictional characters walk off the page all the time, generally as cautionary tales, like Pollyanna or Walter Mitty, but Atticus has inspired legions of lawyers, been memorialized with a public sculpture, had professional-achievement awards and a nonprofit organization named after him, and been invoked admiringly by Barack Obama, who quoted one of the character’s folksy fatherisms in his farewell address as President: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Like any legal precedent, though, Atticus has faced challenges and dissents, and lately his status as a hero has seemed perilously close to being overturned. Criticisms of his accommodationist racial politics, his classism, and his sexism went mainstream a few years ago, after the publication of an earlier novel by Lee, “Go Set a Watchman,” which gave us an older Atticus, and a less admirable one: a grownup Scout came home to Alabama from New York City to find that, in his dotage, her beloved father was opposing the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and attending meetings of a white-supremacist group.

With plenty of actual white men falling from their pedestals, it has seemed, ever since, that Atticus might do so, too. No longer a model of courage and decency even in his fictional daughter’s eyes, he turned out to be a man very much of his time—and, perhaps even worse, of ours, as old prejudices resurge, hate crimes proliferate, and arguments rage about the merits of maintaining civility in the face of bigotry. In October, the Republican senator John Cornyn invoked a talking point that had emerged among conservative commentators, calling the fight to appoint Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court “our Atticus Finch moment.” In doing so, Cornyn ignored the racist post-Reconstruction context of the allegation against Tom Robinson, the persuasiveness of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Kavanaugh, and the fact that all the nominee stood to lose was a job promotion, not his life.

Atticus was suddenly on all the wrong sides, fighting for all the wrong causes. It’s hard to imagine a less auspicious moment to try to bring the character back to life—and yet, for the first time ever, Lee’s beloved father figure is on Broadway, in a new theatrical adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It’s not clear, though, whether Atticus is enjoying a revival or taking his final bow.

“Yes, Atticus was my father,” Harper Lee bluntly acknowledged in a letter to her former Shakespeare professor not long after “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published. Amasa Coleman Lee, the model for the man who was to be a model among men, was born twenty years before the start of the twentieth century, not long after his own father returned from fighting for the Confederacy. Amasa spent most of his early years in Florida, but a bookkeeping job took him to Finchburg, Alabama, where he met Harper Lee’s mother, Frances Cunningham Finch. (That’s where their daughter got the surname for her character; as for the unusual first name, it came from Cicero’s friend Titus Pomponius Atticus, although Lee likely learned it from the Montgomery Advertiser columnist Atticus Mullin, whose pieces she read regularly.)

After Amasa and Frances married, they settled in the county seat, Monroeville, where A.C., as he was known, had accepted a position managing a railroad line for a local law firm. On the side, he taught himself law, passed the bar exam, and got his name added to the shingle. The firm prospered, even during the Great Depression, and so did A.C., who was elected to the state legislature and bought the local newspaper, the Monroe Journal. He then availed himself of many of its column inches for his own editorials. In these articles, the real-life Atticus begins as a New Deal Democrat and ends as a Dixiecrat, honoring Confederate veterans and their cause, supporting the prosecution of the Scottsboro Boys—nine black teen-agers who were falsely accused of raping two white women—and defending the poll tax. He praised law-enforcement officers who protected black prisoners from lynchings but opposed a federal anti-lynching law, writing that it “violates the fundamental idea of states rights and is aimed as a form of punishment upon the southern people.”

A. C. Lee’s politics were lost on no one who knew him, least of all his daughter, who parodied the Monroe Journal in an issue of Rammer Jammer, the humor magazine at the University of Alabama. The Jackassonian Democrat, as the college kids called their version, featured white-hooded figures holding flaming crosses on the masthead and page after page of ersatz local gossip and rural humbuggery. In another issue of Rammer Jammer, Harper Lee mocked a piece of legislation that her father had endorsed: the Boswell Amendment, which required that voters be able to explicate the Constitution to the satisfaction of county registrars. A.C. claimed that it was not an attempt to suppress the black vote but to insure an educated electorate; in his daughter’s satirical version, the leader of “the Citizens’ Committee to Eradicate the Black Plague” designs a literacy test for voters so onerous that not even he can pass it.

Frictions between father and daughter only intensified after 1949, when Harper Lee dropped out of law school in Alabama and moved to New York to become a writer. A great many things were on the cusp of change: Alabama was a few years away from the court-ordered integration of its schools and the protest-driven integration of its buses and lunch counters; Lee, living on peanut-butter sandwiches and writing at a makeshift desk in a make-do apartment in Yorkville, was beginning her ten-year transformation from a small-town Southerner into a big-city author.

In “Atticus Finch: The Biography” (Basic Books), published earlier this year, Joseph Crespino, a historian at Emory University, argues, convincingly, that Lee’s fiction was an attempt “to work out her differences with her father.” However heroic A.C. had seemed to her as a child, the adult Harper Lee could see his faults, even if she could not quite parse them in prose. In “Go Set a Watchman,” her first attempt at fictionalizing him, Scout is twenty-six and living in New York, doing what, exactly, we never learn. The book recounts a trip back home, to Maycomb, where her older brother, Jem, is dead, her best friend, Hank, is desperate to marry and domesticate her, and her father has reacted to Brown v. Board of Education by joining the Citizens’ Council, a sort of genteel K.K.K. Atticus is what the historian Isabel Wilkerson has called “a gentleman bigot,” and “Watchman” is full of stilted exchanges between a benighted father and his more enlightened daughter. It wasn’t only bad storytelling; it was the sort of story that editors didn’t want to tell about the South. When Esquire refused a submission from Lee on the grounds that her Klan-hating, segregation-loving white characters were “an axiomatic impossibility,” she lamented to a friend that, if that were true, “nine-tenths of the South is an axiomatic impossibility.”