Angstrom makes a Best Fictional Characters list

Screen Shot 2014-07-19 at 7.23.16 AMThe Independent asked 100 “leading figures of British literature to name the characters who give them the most reading pleasure.”

Author and critic John Sutherland (A Little History of Literature) picked Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.

“Harry (“Rabbit”) Angstrom, the serial hero of John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, is the only protagonist I’ve grown old with—doomed, but indomitable and lovable,” he writes.

If you’re wondering what other American literary fictional characters made the list, Rhett Butler (Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind) was chosen, as was Raymond Chandler’s private detective Philip Marlowe, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s flawed hero Dick Diver (Tender Is the Night), Humbert Humbert (Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita), Patrick Bateman (Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho), and Herman Melville’s white whale (Moby-Dick).

Two of Philip Roth’s characters (Alexander Portnoy, Mickey Sabbath) made the list, but Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 scored the most, with literary figures choosing three characters from that comic war novel: Yossarian, Dunbar, and Milo.

“Best fictional characters from Sherlock Holmes to Jane Eyre as chosen by 100 literary figures”

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