Harper Lee created the Greatest American Hero
By Stephen L. Carter, Bloomberg View
SOME YEARS AGO, I added To Kill a Mockingbird to the syllabus of my course on Ethics in Literature. I teach in a law school, and the students in the seminar were as hard-bitten and hypercritical as one would expect. Most of the works we read they trashed from one end to the other, often with the easy-going savage hauteur of the young intellectual. But not Mockingbird. They treated the classic with a respect bordering on awe. Prompting them to criticize it was as successful as prompting an Evangelical to criticize the Bible.