The Women Behind the Mockingbird

Tay Hohoff and friend

I once had the opportunity to speak with the editor of one of my all-time favorite children's books. It is, IMHO, a truly beautiful book, and it always brings me to tears. So imagine my surprise when the woman sighed and said that the manuscript that had first come across her desk only barely resembled the book I so love, and that it had taken two years of back-and-forth with the author and hard work on her part to get it into its final shape. It seems that the road to Harper Lee's opus was very similar. The editor of that classic was Tay Hohoff, and according to this article, it was she who guided the process that turned the narrator from a 26-year-old Jean Louise into the younger Scout, Atticus from, by all accounts, a bitter, racist man into the patient father and lawyer with the quiet courage to do the right thing, and Go Set a Watchman into To Kill a Mockingbird: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/books/the-invisible-hand-behind-harper-lees-to-kill-a-mockingbird.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-middle-span-region&region=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region
   Clarissa Atkinson was an assistant at J.P. Lippincott, which published Mockingbird, at the time of Lee and Hohoff and recalls those years in a blog. "Miss Hohoff not only stood up to the important suits in the office," she writes; "she had her own suits, some of them pin-striped. It’s not difficult for me to believe that her influence on Lee and on Mockingbird was substantial – more than that, if she was indeed responsible for the decision to tell the story we know in the voice of the nine-year old narrator": https://oldestvocation.wordpress.com/2015/02/05/mockingbird-years/