Atticus Finch and humanist John Lovejoy Elliot. He notes that the book, "A Ministry to Man", was published in 1959, a year before "Mockingbird." Atticus Finch Atticus Finch is a fictional character in Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1960, "To Kill a Mockingbird". A preliminary version of the character also appears in the novel "Go Set a Watchman", written in the mid 1950s but not published until 2015. Atticus is a lawyer and resident of the fictional Maycomb County, Alabama, and the father of Jeremy "Jem" Finch and Jean Louise "Scout" Finch. Lee based the character on her own father, Amasa
Atticus Finch 100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900" names Finch as the seventh best fictional character of 20th-century literature. In 2003 the American Film Institute voted Atticus Finch, as portrayed in an Academy Award-winning performance by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation, as the greatest hero of all American cinema. In the 2018 Broadway stage play adapted by Aaron Sorkin, Finch is portrayed by Jeff Daniels. Claudia Durst Johnson has commented about critiques of the novel, saying, "A greater volume of critical readings has been amassed by two legal scholars in law journals than by all the literary scholars in