Harper
Lee Letters Fail to Sell at Auction
The New York Times, June
12, 2015
A collection of Harper Lee’s
private letters
failed to sell at auction at Christie’s on Friday. The six letters, which were
written between 1956 and 1961 or were undated, were estimated to be worth
between $150,000 and $250,000. The bidding opened at $80,000 and stopped at
$90,000.
The archive, which was open to the public at
Christie’s before the sale, offered a rare glimpse into Ms. Lee’s private life
during the period during which she was working on “To Kill a Mockingbird” and
“Go Set a Watchman,” the novel that preceded “Mockingbird.”
In the letters, which she wrote to a close
friend, the New York architect Harold Caufield, she describes her conflicted
feelings about her hometown (“Five months of a sort of ecclesiastical gloom
that is Monroeville at present is really too much”) and her creative struggles.
The auction seemed ideally timed, just about a
month ahead of the
much-hyped publication of Ms. Lee’s novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” which she wrote before
“Mockingbird.” Very little of Ms. Lee’s correspondence has gone to auction.
A spokeswoman for Christie’s said that the
letters might be put up for auction again at a later date, or they could remain
with the seller, Paul Kennerson, a book collector and Harper Lee fan.
Other rare manuscripts that went to auction
today included an 1845 first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven and Other
Poems,” which sold for $221,000, and a single leaf from the first edition of
Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” which sold for $6,875. It also included
a 1914 letter that Albert Einstein wrote to his friend and colleague, the
physicist Wilhelm Wien, expressing his excitement over his general theory of
relativity, which sold for $37,500. “Now the Theory of Relativity really is
extended to arbitrarily moving systems,” he wrote.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/harper-lee-letters-fail-to-sell-at-auction/?rref=books&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Books&pgtype=article
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