TL;DR: A fifty-year-old widowed lawyer with terrible eyesight and a secret marksman's hand. Court-appointed defender of Tom Robinson, single father of Jem and Scout, and the most argued-about moral figure in American fiction. Believes the law owes Tom Robinson the same defense it would owe anyone, refuses to raise his voice doing it, and is harder than the cultural memory of him remembers.

Spoiler level: spoiler-light. Discusses his role in the trial and his parenting philosophy in broad strokes. Does not name what he agrees to on the porch in Chapter 30.

Snapshot

Atticus Finch is Maycomb's most respected lawyer and a member of the state legislature, but he lives in his small frame house on the same residential street as the rest of the town, walks to work, and reads on his front porch in the evenings with a folded newspaper in his lap. He is patient, courteous, slow to anger, and almost impossible to provoke. He is also the only adult in the book who treats his children as small adults — answers their questions honestly, refuses to be called "Daddy," tolerates being called Atticus.

Role in the story

Atticus is the moral center of the novel and the book's primary teacher — most of what Scout learns, she learns from him, either in conversation or by watching him handle other people. In Part One he is the loved-but-mildly-embarrassing old father who turns out, in Chapter 10, to be a man Maycomb once called "One-Shot Finch." In Part Two he is the lawyer Maycomb has appointed to defend Tom Robinson, who throws himself into the case with full effort because he believes that not doing so would forfeit his ability to look his children in the eye.

Personality in plain English

The book's adjectives for him are accurate: patient, dignified, plainspoken, near-impossible to anger. He treats every person who comes to his door with the same courteous attention — the missionary ladies, the lynch-mob farmer, the Black housekeeper who has raised his children. He believes in the law as a slow corrective and in the basic decency of his neighbors against considerable evidence to the contrary. He plays a Jew's Harp, was once a champion shot, gave up shooting when he realized it was unsporting, and never speaks of either fact unless directly asked.

What the book also wants you to notice: he is not infallible. He underestimates Bob Ewell's threat. He gives a Finch-family-heritage speech to his children that he abandons mid-sentence because even he cannot finish it. He is asked, on the front porch on a dark night near the end of the book, to choose between his stated principles and the protection of a person he loves — and what he chooses is the most disputed scene in the novel.

What he wants

To raise his children well. To do his job honestly. To live in his town without losing his place in it — and, when forced to choose, to do the right thing first and worry about the place second. He says he wants to be able to "tell his children the truth," and the rest of the book is what that costs.

What he fears

Less than he should about Bob Ewell. Probably more than he lets on about what the trial will do to Jem. He fears — implicitly — that the law he believes in will not be equal to the moral case he is about to argue.

Key relationships

• Scout — his daughter, with whom he has most of the book's important conversations: the lunch-quarter conversation about the Cunninghams (Ch. 3), the "climb into someone's skin" speech (Ch. 3), the "I'm simply defending a Negro" porch conversation (Ch. 9), and the closing reading by Jem's bedside in Chapter 31.
• Jem — his son, whom he treats with quiet trust and to whom he delivers the book's clearest definition of courage. The Mrs. Dubose lesson (Ch. 11) is the centerpiece of their relationship.
• Calpurnia — the housekeeper he refuses to fire when Aunt Alexandra demands it. Lee writes him calling her "a faithful member of this family" — a line that has aged in complicated ways but that, in the moment, is the firmest line he draws in the book.
• Aunt Alexandra — his older sister, with whom he disagrees frequently but politely. She is family, she is in his house, and he extends her the same courtesy he extends every guest.
• Heck Tate — the sheriff who hands him the rifle to shoot the rabid dog, posts up at the jailhouse with him on the lynch-mob night, and overrides him on the porch in Chapter 30.
• Tom Robinson — his client, whom he believes is going to be convicted no matter what he does and whom he therefore owes the most thorough defense he can mount. The trial chapters are the long demonstration of what that owe means.

Visual identity

Tall and lean, slightly stooped in the shoulders from a lifetime of reading. Older than the other fathers in Maycomb — Scout calls him near-blind in his right eye and old enough that he could be her grandfather. Silver-gray hair, deeply receded, with the cleanly horseshoe-shaped hairline of a man who lost most of his hair by forty. A long slightly aquiline nose. Pale gray-blue kind eyes behind round wire-rimmed spectacles, the right lens visibly thicker than the left. A small mole high on the right cheekbone, a vertical line between the brows. Daily uniform: a dark three-piece wool suit, white shirt, slim dark tie, pocket-watch chain across the vest, polished black oxfords; in shirtsleeves and vest on the porch at home; in shirtsleeves with the collar opened and the tie loosened during the closing argument. A folded Mobile Register is almost always in his hand or beside his chair.

Aliases

The following names and references in the book all point to this character. Use any of these as link anchors back to this page.

• Atticus (canonical — the most common form)
• Atticus Finch
• Mr. Finch
• One-Shot Finch
• Ol' One-Shot

Discussion questions

• Atticus is sometimes remembered as a hero who wins by losing. What does the book actually show him winning, and what does it show him losing?
• He refuses to take Bob Ewell's threat seriously and tells his sister "I'd rather it be me than that household full of children." Is the book endorsing that calm, or quietly undercutting it?
• On the porch in Chapter 30, Atticus initially resists Heck Tate's decision about how to label Bob Ewell's death. He gives in. Was that the right call, by his own standards?
• Compare the Atticus of Chapter 10 — One-Shot Finch with the cracked spectacles in the dust — to the Atticus of Chapter 20, sweat through his shirt at the closing argument. What does the book want us to do with those two images side by side?
• Atticus tells Scout: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view." Where in the book does he himself fail at his own instruction?