Harper Lee's original version of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' was rejected - here's how the classic novel came to be

Very few Americans, young or old, haven't been affected by "To Kill a Mockingbird" - a literary classic widely read in schools and later in life.

But as the world mourns Harper Lee's death this week, one fact of the 1960 novel's publication remains little-known.

"To Kill a Mockingbird," when it was first submitted to its publisher, wasn't like the "To Kill a Mockingbird" we know at all.

It had a different title, "Go Set a Watchman," a version of which was published just last year by HarperCollins after an apparent discovery of a manuscript.

As the New York Times has reported, Lee and her agents sent a draft of "Watchman" to publishers in 1957, and J. B. Lippincott and Company bought it for $1,000.

But the editor who worked with Lee, Therese von Hohoff Torrey, didn't want the draft Lee submitted. "Watchman" (both the initial draft and the one published recently) followed the same characters as "Mockingbird," in Maycomb, Alabama, but 20 years later, at which point Scout is an adult and, as it turns out, Atticus Finch has become a bigot.

The editor saw promise but described this draft as "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel." So she suggested to Lee that she set the book much earlier, in Scout's childhood. The rewriting process took two years.

Here's how the Times describes it:

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