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.