Today in literary history: July 11

Here's what happened on July 11 in literary history.

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Grace Brown was murdered July 11, 1906.

Brown was a twenty-year-old factory worker who was found dead in Big Moose Lake in New York's Adirondack Mountains.

It might have seemed like an accidental drowning at first, but an investigation found cuts and bruises — seen as evidence of a pre-drowning attack — and an early pregnancy.

The culprit in both the pregnancy and the death was determined to be Chester Gillette, Brown’s supervisor and the nephew of the factory’s owner; he was executed March 30, 1908, by the electric chair.

Among the many people whose eyes were drawn to this case was an aspiring novelist named Theodore Dreiser; he would go on to fictionalize it in his 1925 novel An American Tragedy.

Interestingly, a witness came forward years after the verdict to say that he saw a search volunteer poking Brown's body with a stick, which could have inflicted the wounds found on her — and which, in turn, could have resulted in Gillette's acquittal. 

Sources: "Chester Gillette, Theodore Dreiser, and the origins of America's fascination with true crime" and "People v. Gilette" at Crime Reads

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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was published July 11, 1960.

To Kill a Mockingbird was first made possible by a Christmas gift from Michael and Joy Brown, who gave Lee a check equal to a year's worth of her salary, so that she could quit her job and focus on writing.

That enabled her to write the novel she called Go Set a Watchman, which she was able to sell after she agreed to significant revisions — namely, focusing more on the narrator's childhood.

Lee spent two years rewriting her novel, a process that was so frustrating at times that she once literally threw the pages out of her apartment window.

Fortunately for all of us, she called her editor, who ordered her to go out and pick the pages up.

By the time Mockingbird officially came out, it was already a hit, with four national mail-order book clubs having already selected it for their readers, and it has never gone out of print, selling over 40 million copies in the process. 

One more fun fact: actor Brock Peters, who played Tom Robinson in the Mockingbird film adaptation, delivered the eulogy for fellow actor Gregory Peck, who played Atticus Finch.

Sources: National Endowment for the Arts, History.com, New York State Writers Institute