As Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman shows, writers often need editors to coax out their best

Behind many classics, there lurks a brilliant editor

Go Set a Watchman became To Kill a Mockingbird with the help of Harper Lee's editor Tay Hohoff Photo: Hannah McKay/PA Wire

By Sameer Rahim

The Telegraph - 15 July 2015

Whether or not you believe that Harper Lee’s second published novel, Go Set a Watchman, adds to our understanding of To Kill a Mockingbird, or feel betrayed that the hero Atticus Finch has been revealed as a Ku Klux Klan member – or even both – it is important to remember that the book is neither a sequel nor a prequel but a first draft of the novel that later won a Pulitzer Prize and sold 40  million copies.

• Gaby Wood's review of Go Set a Watchman: 'an anxious work in progress'

Lee submitted her manuscript to a New York publisher in 1957, where it came into the hands of the editor Tay Hohoff, a chain-smoking veteran who had joined the firm of JB Lippincott 25 years earlier. Hohoff said she “found many things wrong” with Lee’s book, but recognised that “there was also life”. She worked closely with Lee, suggesting she draw the action away from the Fifties back to the Thirties and retell the story of Scout’s childhood from the young girl’s point of view. Hohoff, who died in the mid-Seventies, did not co-author To Kill a Mockingbird, but she did make it possible for Lee to write the best novel she could.

Hohoff is far from unique. Contrary to the myth that authors work best in lonely isolation, the truth is that editors or close advisers have often quietly shaped great books. James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson would not be half so entertaining had it not been for the assistance of Shakespeare scholar Edmund Malone. The novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton advised Charles Dickens to change the ending of Great Expectations from one where Pip and Estella definitely don’t get together to one in which, in that wonderfully ambiguous final line, Pip sees “no shadow of another parting from her”. 
More