Now, a Literary Moment...

For six years, Harper Lee worked odd jobs in New York City to make ends meet, writing in the evenings. Finally, she got a book contract with a major publisher.

Biographer Charles J. Shields.

Charles Shields: So for two and half years, living almost entirely on her advance alone, she worked on this novel. At one point, she got so fed up that she got up from her desk, went over to the window, and threw it out in the snow, the entire manuscript. ?. She called her editor, Tay Hohoff, at Lippincott and told her what she'd done and Tay told her to march out and get it all back.

And lucky for us, publishers often refer to their daily avalanche of unsolicited manuscripts as the 'slush pile.' But To Kill A Mockingbird may be the only classic that needed rescuing from a slush pile even after a publisher accepted it.

This Literary Moment was created by the National Endowment for the Arts