To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch voted most inspiring character

Despite last year’s revelation in Harper Lee’s sequel of his later racism, a survey of UK readers has declared him literature’s most stirring hero, over Harry Potter, Bridget Jones and Frodo Baggins

Atticus Finch, hero of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, is the most inspiring character in literature, according to new research – despite his outing as a racist in Lee’s sequel last summer.

A survey of 2,000 UK adults to mark the 10th anniversary of literacy charity Quick Reads found that Finch, the lawyer father of Lee’s child heroine Scout, topped the list of the most inspiring literary character for both men and women. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Finch defends a black man accused of raping a white woman, but in Go Set a Watchman, the surprise sequel published by Lee last summer, he takes a different perspective on race, asking his daughter: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

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