How Lucky was Harper Lee, Revisited

Late last year, after reading "Go Set a Watchman," I wrote a post entitled "How Lucky was Harper Lee?"

My point was that when "Watchman," essentially the first draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird," was published last year amid considerable controversy, it was met with a hail of criticism as to how terrible it was. But when Tay Hohoff read it in 1957 at the publishing house J.B. Lippincott, she took a different view and helped Lee transform it into what turned out to be a Pulitzer Prize winning American classic.

How Lucky Was Harper Lee?

Thanks to a very high-profile controversy over the recent publication of "Go Set a Watchman," most fans of fiction have been well-reminded of the story of Harper Lee.

In 1957, she brought to the publishing house J. B. Lippincott a problematic manuscript that was read by an editor named Therese von Hohoff Torrey ( known as Tay Hohoff) who saw potential in Harper's writing and worked closely with the author over the next couple of years. The end result was "To Kill a Mockingbird," which won a Pulitzer Prize and has been for decades one of the best-known and most loved works of American literature.