One letter, from January 1962, even revealed details about the crafting of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and until this month, her only published book:

Most good books are ones that have been a long time maturing, with a lot of cutting and fitting and replanning done along the way. MOCKINGBIRD, for instance, was about the most replanned and rewritten book I ever had a hand in, and it turned out finally that all the labor on it was well justified, and if the Lippincott editors hadn’t been so fussy and painstaking we wouldn’t have had nearly so good a book.

Crain’s relationship with Lee has long been a subject of interest among those who research the reclusive author. In his 2006 biography of Lee, Charles J. Shields writes of a mentor relationship between the two that eventually grew into a deep friendship. Shields’s work, since expanded by the Washington Post’s investigative report on Watchman, shows that Lee and Crain’s working relationship began in late 1956, when she gave him five short stories. Crain found one, “Snow-on-the-Mountain,” promising, but returned the others, suggesting she consider writing a novel, which would be easier to sell. In January, Lee delivered an additional story and “the first fifty pages of a novel, Go Set a Watchman.”

The growing consensus has long been that Mockingbird was reworked from Watchman, and with reason. HarperCollins published Go Set a Watchman on July 14, and in February one of their representatives said, “there will not be any editing to the book, as it is not necessary.” (It remains unclear whether Lee’s editors at HarperCollins have had any direct contact with her since she suffered a stroke in 2007.) But as I learned through my grandfather’s correspondence with Crain, To Kill a Mockingbird was nevertheless the product of considerable encouragement, advice, and revision, much of it coming from a man who saw it as his mission to champion writers like Lee and Bonner, whose deceptively gentle small-town stories were rapidly falling out of fashion.

Ari N. Schulman

* * *

I recall my grandfather once expressing frustration at “spigot writers”—those who could just open the tap—even though he wrote one of his books in just three months, because, as he put it, “we were hungry.” But this was just part of the lore. As a kid in Houston, I’d had a friend whose grandfather had been to the moon (twice!), but I remained more in awe of the feats of my own. Writing novels was a great—and, at least for those already written, obviously preordained—business.

Here in his letters these feats are brought to earth, with all their struggles and contingencies—a career’s worth between two manila folds. Part of the charm in reading them stems from discovering how little the publishing biz has changed—push and tug, bitter pills of criticism delivered with sugar of flattery—as well as how readily the patter of 1950s speech smoothed these exchanges for two men who were far from rubes.