ABSTRACT
Perhaps no other novel has captured the hearts and minds of White North American readers more than Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (TKAM). TKAM won the esteemed Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, a year after its publication, and is considered the “best book of the 20th century” by the American Library Association. The Guinness Book of World Records ranks TKAM as the top-selling novel of all time, and the Library of Congress declares that TKAM is second only to the Bible in terms of its influence on people’s lives (Anderson, 2008). As such, TKAM consistently shows up on approved school reading lists and is one of the top-10 most frequently taught books in North American high schools (Applebee, 1993; Stallworth, Gibbons, & Fauber, 2006; Stallworth & Gibbons, 2012). A 2010 national survey found TKAM to be the second most-assigned text in the country (Stotsky, 2010).
