It has been a bad summer for the iconic characters of Southern literature.
Over at the Paris Review, Sadie Stein takes a look at the unfortunate facts: Atticus was kind of a racist, and Atticus is the most popular male baby name in 2015. Maybe, Stein surmises, it’s impossible to avoid baggage with any name. She writes, “As written now, he’s for all the world just another relative—flawed and ambivalent and human.”