The Results Are In…These Are America’s “Most-Beloved” Novels, Says PBS

The results are in: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a seminal exploration of racial discrimination in a small Southern town as seen through the eyes of six-year-old Scout Finch, is officially America’s “best-loved novel.”

PBS’ Great American Read initiative, which launched in May as a nationwide celebration of reading, has concluded with more than 4.3 million votes cast on an eclectic list of 100 books ranging from The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic portrait of Jazz Age opulence, to The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s polarizing, genre-bending bestseller, and The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s intimate account of a 14-year-old murder victim’s afterlife.

Host Meredith Vieira revealed the knock-out winner during a one-hour grand finale special that aired Tuesday night. As Vieira noted, the 1960 classic led the race from week one and never yielded its first-place status over five months of voting. According to USA Today’s Jocelyn McClurg, Mockingbird received a total of 242,275 votes.