Personal letters of author fail to sell at auction

After much advance press coverage, and in a year of unprecedented interest in the private life of Harper Lee, six personal letters of hers on sale at Christie’s have failed to sell at auction.

The six letters were addressed to Lee’s architect friend, Harold Caulfield, anddated between 1956 and 1961, which was the period that Lee wrote her celebrated classic, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Personal letters of Lee’s are rarely publicly available, so their failure to sell no doubt comes as a surprise to Paul Kennerman, the seller, who is said to have acquired the letters privately. Christie’s had said they were hoping for a sale of up to $250,000 (50 million Naira).

Her letters to Caulfield celebrate the eventual success of the book but also record certain difficulties in Lee’s career. In 1956, she wrote of her “longing to get back [to New York], for so many reasons … I simply can’t work here. Genius overcomes all obstacles, etc, and this is no excuse, but I think the record will show the extent of my output at 1539 York [Ave].”

Lee specifically complains that her hometown of Monroeville stymied progress on the novel. “Sitting & listening to people you went to school with is excruciating for an hour – to hear the same conversation day in & day out is better than the Chinese Torture method. It’s enough to make you give up,” she wrote.