This June - the month of Father's Day - we asked readers for their favorite dads or father figures in literature. About forty of you replied. I guess it shouldn't have come as a surprise that nine of those responses named the same fictional hero - Atticus Finch from Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. And I'm pretty sure that despite many other versions, in our heads he looks like this:

Gregory Peck in the 1962 Robert Mulligan-directed film To Kill a Mockingbird, looking every inch the man of whom you'd say, "Stand up, boy - your father's passing."

Here's Harper Lee's book To Kill a Mockingbird in all kinds of formats (plus Horton Foote's film screenplay).
Here's the recording of Casey Cep's 2021 Library presentation on Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.

An additional 3 respondents registered the genial patriarch of Jane Austen's Bennet clan as their favorite. Read Austen's Pride and Prejudice in the friendly Modern Library edition of 1995 or in the Norton authoritative text, or check out versions with annotations or based on early texts, with critical context and commentary, or with zombies.

Pride and Prejudice's Mr Bennet played by Edmund Gwenn (1940), Moray Watson (1980), Benjamin Whitrow (1995), and Donald Sutherland (2005). Mr Bennet always has a book.

It was widely pointed out how dominant fathers are in 19th-century British lit - including four mentions of Charles Dickens - for John Jarndyce (Bleak House), Joe Gargery (Great Expectations), Bob Cratchit (A Christmas Carol) - or, as an example of how not to father, Edward Murdstone (David Copperfield).

Other favorite fathers appear in

Classics:

• Pa Ingalls in Little House in the Big Woods and its sequels by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• George Caldwell, the father-teacher in The Centaur by John Updike
• Polonius from Shakespeare's Hamlet
• Father Day in Life With Father by Clarence Day
• Manuel the Portuguese fisherman in Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
• Geppetto from The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi - this excellent translation by Geoffrey Brock has an introduction by Umberto Eco
• And, drawn even more from real life, Otto Frank as portrayed in The Diary of Anne Frank (this image borrowed from Amsterdam's Anne Frank House)

More recent literature:

• Harold Stein, Jude's law professor and adoptive father in A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
• Major Ernest Pettigrew from Major Pettrigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson
• Al-Sayyid Ahmad 'Abd al-Jawad in the Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street) by Naguib Mahfouz
• The father in Cormac McCarthy's The Road
• Rahim Khan from The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (the image here shows Shaun Toub in the role in the 2007 film)
• Thomas Schell from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Fantasy

• Ender Wiggin from Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
• Gandalf in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and other works by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Ned Stark from A Game of Thrones and its sequels by George R.R. Martin

Children's and young adult books:

• The hero of Neil Gaiman's Fortunately, the Milk (great for grown-ups too!)
• Sebastien Durand in Dhonielle Clayton's The Marvellers
• Matthew Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
• William, the dad in Danny, the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl - also one of this blogger's favorites!
• Arthur Parnassus in T.J. Klune's The House in the Cerulean Sea
• Hans Hubermann in The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

And among less conventional - but still winning - father figures, we have Horton in Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss.

Happy reading to all the dads and kids of dads out there -

Roald Dahl's concluding "moral" in Danny, the Champion of the World