Hatrack member satate asked in an earlier thread about endings and I've now happened upon the following stuff w/concern Harper Lee's development of the same in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (from MOCKINGBIRD: A PORTRAIT OF HARPER LEE, by Charles J. Shields (2006) http://www.charlesjshields.com/content/index.asp ):

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By November 1956 she had completed a handful of stories[...]. "I walked around the block three times before I could muster the courage to go in and give the stories to an agent," [Lee said....] The Lippicott editors were all men except one:[...]Tay Hohoff.[...]The editors[...said Lee's] "character's stood on their own two fee, they were three-dimensional[; o]n the other hand [...Lee's ms] was "more of a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel."[...] At the end of the summer, [Lee] resubmitted her manuscript to Hohoff, who had volunteered to work with her. "It was better. It wasn't RIGHT," [Hohoff said...]. "Obviously, a keen and witty and even wise mind had been at work; but was this mind of a professional novelist? There were dangling threads of plot, there was lack of unity--a beginning, a middle, and end that was inherent in the beginning."

[...According to Lee's biographer], a novel[...]needs an overarching story, deep and big enough to encompass everything else, especially the ongoing development over time of related characters and theme.[...Lee]rewrote the novel three times: the original draft was in the third person[...].

The writing went at a glacial pace.

[...]Hohoff remembered, "We talked it out, sometime for hours. And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes mine to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line of country.[...T]he story line, interplay of characters, and fall of emphasis grew clearer, and with each revision--there were many minor changes as the story grew in strength and in Nelle's own vision of it--the true stature of the novel became evident."

Interesting quote I read on Wikipedia:

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In the 33 years since its publication, [...TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD] has never been the focus of a dissertation, and it has been the subject of only six literary studies, several of them no more than a couple of pages long.
—Claudia Johnson in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: THREATENING BOUNDARIES (1994)
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__ ( I. ) Rejection Letter __
p216-17

[From Harold Hayes of, I think, ESQUIRE]

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I feel lousy about returning this to you--on several counts: 1)I asked you to do it; 2)you knocked yourself out to make our deadline; 3)it's something, I know, of great significance to you and the other principals involved.

What seemed to go wrong--from our point of view--from our point of view--is that the piece is working too hard to carry a lot of weight--humor, characterization, the barbarity of the Klan, the goodness of a brave man and so on. A novel's worth, in fact, with the result that it never quite makes it on either of these levels as a short feature.

I'm sympathetic to your decision to change it to a fictional form, and I really don't think that is a factor against it.
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__ ( II. ) UofAlabama Prof's Critique of MOCKINGBIRD'S Use of Cliches __
p201-02

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[Lee] had written an essay that appeared in VOGUE magazine.[...]As James B. McMillan, chairman of the English Department at the University of Alabama, pointed out shortly after TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD won the Pulitzer, the novel was a "mixture of ingredients that ought to guarantee a bad novel. The story is told from the point of view of an eight-year-old child; it is set in the kind of Southern small town that has been described in fiction a thousand times; the characters are exactly the types that a correspondence-school course in fiction would prescribe for a Southern small town novel. . . . The denouement is pure Gothic fiction." But, said McMillan, what puts the book head and shoulders above others of its type is that "Miss Lee remembers much of what she has seen, heard, and felt; she has discriminating feelings and judgments about what she has seen and heard; she knows what to tell and what to leave out; and she must have worked hard at the craft of putting words on paper. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a superior book because it was written by a superior person who became a professional writer without inflicting her apprenticeship on the public in a trial book."
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----Oh! there's one OTHER snippet that stood out to me I've forgotten to mention: where Lee stands up for MOCKINGBIRD as exemplifying ethics (sort of a "Manners" theme--if I can use that word?)

__ ( III. ) Theme's Underlying Ethic(/"Manners"?) __
(p254-55)

[After a board of ed Virginia decided to remove MOCKINGBIRD from use in their schools and a back-and-forth series of letter to the editor had appeared on the controversy in the RICHMOND NEWS-LEADER, Harper Lee wrote]:

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Recently I have received echos down this way of the Hanover County School Board's activities, and what I've heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read.

Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that "To Kill a Mockingbird" spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is "immoral" has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.

I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism. Therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.
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[According to Lee's biographyer, eventually MOCKINGBIRD was restored to the district's school libraries "because of a technicality of board policy."]

(BTW, here's a review of Shields's Harper Lee biography by Thos. Mallon in THE NEW YORKER.-->

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/29/060529crbo_books