Atticus Finch A Racist In Mockingbird Sequel

To Kill A Mockingbird's crusading lawyer Atticus Finch - one of the most revered characters in American literature - is portrayed as a racist in author Harper Lee's new book.

Go Set A Watchman is being published on Tuesday, 55 years after Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning portrait of racial injustice in the American South.

But even before the novel hits the shelves, its shocking plot twist has disillusioned many fans.

Atticus, the small town Alabama lawyer, risks his physical safety in the first book to defend a black man charged with raping a white woman.

His character was immortalised by Gregory Peck in the 1962 Oscar-winning movie of the novel.

But in Watchman, Atticus is a bigot who attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting and opposes desegregation.

The novel shows Scout, a six-year-old tomboy in Mockingbird, as a sexually liberated woman in her 20s returning home from New York to Maycomb, Alabama, to visit Atticus.

She is shocked by the views of her father, who is now 72 and arthritic, according to advance copies distributed to US media.

Watchman, set in the mid-1950s two decades after the action of the first novel, finds Atticus in possession of a racist tract called The Black Plague.

He also reproaches his daughter for her progressive views on equality.

"Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?" he asks Scout, according to reviewers.

He also says: "The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people."

Scornful of federal decrees ending segregation in US schools, Atticus says: "Can you blame the South for resenting being told what to do about its own people by people who have no idea of its daily problems?"

Publisher HarperCollins issued a statement late on Friday in anticipation of the backlash.

It said: "The question of Atticus's racism is one of the most important and critical elements in this novel, and it should be considered in the context of the book's broader moral themes."

But many fans are inconsolable.

Jamie Harding, a charity worker who lives in Alabama, tweeted: "Atticus Finch as a segregationist? It's like finding out Santa Claus beats his reindeer."

The book is already the most pre-ordered novel on Amazon.com since the 2007 release of JK Rowling's last book in the Harry Potter series.

Lee, now 89 and residing in an assisted living facility in her Alabama hometown , has done no publicity for the novel.