‘Mockingbird’ soars as America’s favorite novel
And “America’s best-loved novel” is … “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
PBS crowned Harper Lee’s 1960 Southern classic the winner Tuesday night during the final episode of “The Great American Read,” an eight-part series devoted to discovering readers’ favorite work of fiction.
Diana Gabaldon’s romantic timetraveling series “Outlander,” made even more popular by the Starz series, was second. J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books had the magic touch at third.
PBS invited the public to vote on 100 finalists, a diverse list that included classics, contemporary novels, youngadult favorites, children’s books and best-sellers such as the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy and James Patterson’s Alex Cross mysteries.
Series such as “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” competed with individual books including “Beloved” by Toni Morrison and “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The 100 finalists were chosen through a demographically diverse national survey of 7,200 Americans asked to name their favorite novels. The survey was done by by YouGov.
“Mockingbird” received 242,275 votes of nearly 4.3 million cast. Voting began May 22 and ended Oct. 18.
Seven of the top 10 books were written by women; five of the top 10 authors are American. Another popular Southern novel that has courted controversy – Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind,” – came in sixth.
Three 19th-century classics fared well (“Pride and Prejudice,” “Jane Eyre” and “Little Women”) as did fantasy series (“Harry Potter,” “Outlander,” “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Chronicles of Narnia”).
“I’m not surprised at all that Americans chose “To Kill a Mockingbird,” host Meredith Vieira said. “It is a personal favorite ... one that truly opened my eyes to a world outside of my own.”
Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is the story of a girl, Scout Finch, in 1930s Alabama whose father, Atticus Finch, defends a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman.
The reputation of “Mockingbird” and its reclusive author seemed threatened in 2015 with the publication of “Go Set a Watchman,” only the second novel published by Lee. Written in the 1950s and hidden for decades, “Watchman” essentially is a first draft of “Mockingbird” that was rejected at the time by editors.
Upon publication, “Watchman” made international headlines for its shocking portrayal of Atticus as a bigot. The controversial book became an instant best-seller but received lukewarm reviews. Lee died in 2016 at 89.
Voting readers, it seems, still view Atticus as the heroic heart and soul of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”