Harper Lee And The Gift That Saved 'To Kill A Mockingbird'

It's Christmas Day and a young Harper Lee is sitting on a living room couch in the Upper East Side apartment of friends, a married couple named Michael and Joy Brown. She's homesick for Alabama, for "my grandparents' house bursting with cousins" and for "the sound of hunting boots, the sudden open-door gusts of chilly air that cut through the aroma of pine needles and oyster dressing."

The description comes from an essay Lee wrote for McCall's magazine in 1961. She says an apartment in Manhattan is not where she wants to be on this day: she is stewing with resentment because she can't get enough time off from her day job as an airline reservation agent to travel back to Monroeville for the holidays.

At this moment, Harper Lee is a typical young New Yorker with a dream of making it in the arts: near-broke, craving time to write, and periodically lonely. She has finished a novel about a young woman like herself who lives in the city but periodically visits her home in the South — the book that was published last year under the title, "Go Set A Watchman."

Sorry, Try Again

But when Lee originally turned in that manuscript, her editor told her to start again, this time on a story set entirely in Lee's hometown and told from a little girl's point of view.

Of course that book would become "To Kill A Mockingbird," which was published in 1960, unleashing what a reviewer called a "storm of high praise" for the author. But Lee's McCall's essay describes a Christmas before that storm broke, during a period when she wasn't sure how she'd find the time to finish her second book.

She writes that she took pleasure in watching the Browns' young boys open presents by the tree. But then, when the presents were all opened, it dawned on her that there hadn't been one for her. She says, "I tried to hide my disappointment." It was an utterly demoralizing moment.

A Full, Fair Chance

But then, a miracle of sorts. Joy Brown directs Lee's attention to an envelope with Lee's name on it that is nestled in the branches of the Christmas tree. Inside of it is a gift from the couple that Lee describes later as "a full, fair chance for a new life."

Listen to hear more about what that gift entailed, and how it helped make possible a classic of American literature, "To Kill A Mockingbird."

The book is now so central to our culture that it exudes an air of inevitability. But that wasn't the case one Christmas Day on the Upper East Side of New York, when the literary existence of Scout and Atticus and Boo depended on a tired but determined Harper Lee. And on an envelope in a tree.