The literary world was rocked this past week as news spread that Harper Lee’s sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird (actually written before the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic) reveals Atticus Finch to be a racist. Go Set a Watchman follows daughter “Scout” (now adult and using her given names “Jean Louise” and living in New York) on a return to Maycomb, Alabama to visit her father.

The shock and disillusionment Jean Louise feels as she realizes the moral compass of her world was corrupted by bigotry, that the pure remembrance she had of her father was the false idealization a child creates around a parent, has been shared by many lifelong admirers of the heroic Atticus they met in Mockingbird (both the 1960 book and 1962 movie).

So beloved was the Atticus Finch we’ve lived with for 55 years that some Harper Lee fans refuse to read Go Set a Watchman. Still others note that the Atticus Finch who emerges in the clear eyes of an adult Jean Louise is truer to the people who would have lived his life in his place and time.

It is interesting that Harper Lee wrote the actual Atticus first and then, in a more polished book, placed him in the memory of a child as a true literary hero. The timing of each book’s publication seems perfectly matched to the social conversations taking place when they came out.

Whatever you feel about the quality of the writing and the uncomfortable revelation about Atticus Finch, the pairing of Go Set a Watchman with To Kill a Mockingbird serves a purpose beyond storytelling. Together, they accomplish what few books do but which more books should aspire to: reflect the truth of what it is to be human, to acknowledge that there is dark and light in each of us. What we see in others says as much about us as about them. For this reason, Harper Lee’s only two novels to be published should be considered in tandem.