Only Jesus made his father more famous. Harper Lee’s father was actually named Amasa, but, by the end of his life, he was answering to “Atticus Finch,” a reflection of how closely the character was modelled on him and how wildly well known his fictional doppelgänger had become. When “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published, in 1960, it instantly—and seemingly irrevocably—entered the canon of American literature; it won the Pulitzer Prize, was adapted into an Oscar-winning film, sold tens of millions of copies in more than forty languages, and was eventually assigned to half a century’s worth of middle-school students—some of whom were themselves named Atticus, or had pets named for his daughter, Scout, or her friend Dill, or their strange neighbor, Boo Radley.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” is now a kind of secular scripture, one of only a handful of texts most Americans have in common. This fall, millions of viewers voted it the nation’s “most beloved novel” on the PBS show “The Great American Read,” the literary equivalent of “American Idol.”
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