‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ named America’s best-loved novel

Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” has been voted America’s best-loved novel, according to PBS’s “The Great American Read” survey.

The book was announced as No. 1 in the survey during the show’s finale Tuesday night. 

According to The Associated Press, there were reportedly over 4 million votes cast in the contest, which was conducted over a six-month period and which featured 100 titles up for consideration. 

Books that were published as a series, like J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter,” counted as a single entry, the AP reported. Rowling’s series ended among the top five in the survey.

{mosads}“The novel started out at No. 1 on the first day of the vote, and it never wavered,” series host Meredith Vieira said of Lee’s classic, according to the news agency. 

Several other runner-ups to in PBS’s survey included Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander,” Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” saga.

Lee’s novel concerns racial inequality in a small Alabama town during the 1930s. The book was immediately successful after it was published in 1960 and went on to win the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction before becoming a classic work of modern American literature and a widely successful film by the same name.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” has drawn renewed attention in recent months after several schools announced they would no longer require the book to be read as part of their English curriculum, following reports the language inside was making students uncomfortable.