Tay Hohoff retired from a senior editorial position at the firm in 1973 and died the following year.
12 Facts About Tay Hohoff
1.
2.
Tay Hohoff attended Brooklyn Friends, a Quaker school near her home.
3.
Tay Hohoff was small and wiry with a deep, gravelly voice.
4.
Tay Hohoff acted as literary editor for several authors, including Harper Lee, Nicholas Delbanco, Thomas Pynchon, Eugenia Price, Zelda Popkin, Wayne Greenhaw, and Lane Kauffmann.
5.
Tay Hohoff retired from the firm in 1973 as a senior vice president, a senior editorial position that was rare for a woman to hold at a major publishing house at that time.
6.
An author herself, Tay Hohoff published A Ministry to Man in 1959.
7.
In 1973 Tay Hohoff published a memoir, Cats and Other People.
8.
Tay Hohoff worked closely with her authors to transform their manuscripts into critically acclaimed novels through several edits and rewrites.
9.
Tay Hohoff would go through the manuscript and jot down little questions in the margins.
10.
When Tay Hohoff first saw Harper Lee's manuscript in 1957, she considered it to be "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel" though "the spark of the true writer flashed in every line".
11.
The commercial and critical success of the novel led to pressure on Lee to publish a second novel but Tay Hohoff "guarded Nelle like a junkyard dog".
12.
Therese Nunn, Tay Hohoff's granddaughter, said that it was disrespectful to her grandmother's work and legacy that the novel was published after only a light edit, considering the effort that went into changing and polishing To Kill A Mockingbird.