Hohoff, who died in 1974 at the age of 75, was in a different mold. Maxwell Perkins, the longtime editorial director at Charles Scribner’s Sons, told Ernest Hemingway to “tone it down,” and cut 90,000 words from Thomas Wolfe’s debut novel, “Look Homeward, Angel.” Gordon Lish rewrote entire passages of Raymond Carver’s stories, and later boasted about it to friends. Publishing lore is filled with stories of famously headstrong editors imposing their will on authors.
Hohoff have felt about the decision, more than a half-century later, to publish a prototype of “Mockingbird”? Lee as she transformed this book into “Mockingbird”? Maybe more to the point, how big a role did she play in reconceiving the story from a dark tale of a young woman’s disillusionment with her father’s racist views, to a redemptive one of moral courage and human decency? And, for that matter, how would Ms. The release of “Watchman,” which has been only lightly copy-edited, also leads inevitably to the question: Who was the invisible hand guiding Ms. Her father, the great Atticus Finch, is a bigot. The main characters may be the same, but “Watchman” is an entirely different book in both shape and tone from “Mockingbird.” Scout is not an impressionable child in Maycomb, Ala., looking up to her heroic father, but a young woman from Maycomb living in New York. Now, this week’s publication of “Go Set a Watchman” offers a rare glimpse at the before and after of a book widely regarded as a masterpiece.
Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It was, as she described it, “more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel.” During the next couple of years, she led Ms. Hohoff saw it, the manuscript was by no means fit for publication. “he spark of the true writer flashed in every line,” she would later recount in a corporate history of Lippincott.īut as Ms. Lippincott Company, which eventually bought it.Īt Lippincott, the novel fell into the hands of Therese von Hohoff Torrey - known professionally as Tay Hohoff - a small, wiry veteran editor in her late 50s. In the spring of 1957, a 31-year-old aspiring novelist named Harper Lee - everyone called her Nelle - delivered the manuscript for “Go Set a Watchman” to her agent to send out to publishers, including the now-defunct J.
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