A collection of letters written by "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee failed to sell at auction Friday at Christie's in New York. The six typewritten letters from Lee to her friend Harold Caufield, an architect, had been estimated to sell for as much as $250,000. 
 
 The auction came about a month before the release of Harper Lee's much-anticipated second novel, "Go Set a Watchman." It's the first book from Lee, 89, since her classic "To Kill A Mockingbird" was published in 1960. 
 
 The letters were written between 1956 and 1961, and some were signed with "comic pseudonyms" such as "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "R. Bouverie Pusey." 
 
 The San Diego consignor, who wanted to remain anonymous until after the sale, said he paid considerably less than the $250,000 estimate, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported. 
 
 The consignor collects rare books and manuscripts as a hobby, according to the Union-Tribune. 
 
 The auction house described the lot as a "poignant and especially rare" collection written to "one of [Lee's] oldest and closest friends." Four of the letters were written before "To Kill a Mockingbird" was published in 1960, and one of those was written about her father, the inspiration for the character Atticus Finch. 
 
 Another letter, written in December 1960, describes her reaction to the success of "To Kill a Mockingbird." "We were surprised, stunned & dazed by the Princeton review ... The procurator of Judea is breathing heavily down my neck -- all that lovely, lovely money is going straight to the Bureau of Internal Revenue tomorrow ... Must stop and take my rock-and-roll aunt Alice to the show. Elvis is on." 
 
 The lot also includes an autographed copy of the 35th anniversary edition of "To Kill a Mockingbird," inscribed to Caufield with the note, "Hal: Can you believe it?? You've lived to see this, and still have all your teeth and gumption. You will always be my beloved friend, hairless though you are." 
 
 In another letter, Lee complains of spending five months in small-town Monroeville, Ala., the Guardian reports, lamenting its "ecclesiastical gloom" as "really too much." In the end, Lee wound up back in Monroeville, where the 89-year-old now resides in an assisted living facility. 
 
 Follow Ryan Parker on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. ||||| NEW YORK (AP) — Six letters by "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee to one of her close friends failed to sell at auction Friday. 
 
 FILE - In this Aug. 20, 2007, file photo, author Harper Lee, who wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird,” smiles during a ceremony honoring her at the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala. Six letters by Lee, to one of... (Associated Press) 
 
 The archive had been expected to bring as much as $250,000 at Christie's, which said the bidding did not reach the reserve price. 
 
 Four of the letters date from before "Mockingbird" while Lee was caring for her ailing father, Amasa Coleman Lee, the model for her protagonist Atticus Finch. 
 
 The signed and typed letters were written to Lee's friend, New York architect Harold Caufield, between 1956 and 1961, according to Christie's, which is selling them on Friday. 
 
 In one, she writes about her "stunned" reaction to the huge success of the book, published in 1960 and made into a movie starring Gregory Peck two years later. 
 
 "We were surprised, stunned & dazed by the Princeton review," she wrote. "The procurator of Judea is breathing heavily down my neck — all that lovely, lovely money is going straight to the Bureau of Internal Revenue tomorrow." 
 
 In another letter she tells Caufield: "Daddy is sitting beside me at the kitchen table. ... I found myself staring at his handsome old face, and a sudden wave of panic flashed through me, which I think was an echo of the fear and desolation that filled me when he was nearly dead. It has been years since I have lived with him on a day-to-day basis." 
 
 The sale comes as Lee's second book, "Go Set a Watchman," is set to be released in July. It was written before the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Mockingbird" but takes place 20 years later. Lee's agreement to release the book stunned the literary world. "Watchman" has been ranked No. 1 in new releases of classic literature and fiction on Amazon.com for weeks. 
 
 "She's arguably one of the most important American novelists of the post-war period who has not published a great deal," said Tom Lecky, Christie's head of books and manuscripts. "She's remained a private figure so the appearance of an archive like this is a very important moment in the marketplace. Only three other letters of hers have come up at auction within the last 35 years." 
 
 Christie's said the seller, who wished to remain anonymous, acquired the letters on the open market. The auctioneer intentionally has blurred the contents in its catalog and online to protect the author's privacy. 
 
 The 89-year-old Lee, who is in declining health and lives in an assisted-living home in Monroeville, Alabama, could not be reached for comment about the sale. Her attorney, Tonja Brooks Carter, did not return an email and phone request for comment. 
 
 In a 1961 letter Lee wrote that Esquire magazine turned down her "pastiche" about "some white people who were segregationists & at the same time loathed & hated the K.K.K. This is an axiomatic impossibility, according to Esquire!" 
 
 The letters, totaling eight pages, are signed as "Nelle," ''N.H." or with comic pseudonyms including "The prisoner of Zenda," a reference to an 1894 novel about a king who is drugged and kidnapped on the eve of his coronation. 
 
 The letters present "an interesting bracket of before and after of a monumental moment in American letters where you have the time leading up to while she's writing her book and then you get a glimpse into her reaction to the reaction," said Lecky. "You see how the book was received and how she received those reviews." ||||| Photo Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 On Dec. 12, 1960, Harper Lee sat down at her typewriter and wrote an exuberant letter to her close friend, the New York architect Harold Caufield, expressing her shock and delight at a glowing review of her debut novel. 
 
 “We were surprised, stunned & dazed by the Princeton Review,” she wrote. “I haven’t recovered my voice on the subject enough to say anything.” 
 
 It was a striking contrast to another, more morose letter she had written to him, in which she complained of being unable to write. 
 
 Despite her towering stature in the literary world for her blockbuster novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” little is known about Ms. Lee’s personal life, politics or writing habits. Few living authors are as shrouded in mystery. She gave her last formal interview in the 1960s, and though by all accounts she is a prolific letter writer, very little of her personal correspondence has trickled out, to the frustration of scholars. 
 
 Now, as anticipation builds for Ms. Lee’s long-waited second book, “Go Set a Watchman,” a rare collection of six personal letters that Ms. Lee wrote to Mr. Caufield has surfaced, offering an oblique window into her creative struggles; her strained relationship with her hometown, Monroeville, Ala.; her views on religion and Southern politics; and her adoration for her father, A. C. Lee, a model for the crusading lawyer Atticus Finch. 
 
 The letters, which will be auctioned off at Christie’s on Friday and are estimated to be worth as much as $250,000, were written between 1956 and 1961. (Some are undated.) During that period Ms. Lee wrote “Go Set a Watchman,” which she sold to J. B. Lippincott in October 1957. The novel, set in the fictional Alabama town of Maycomb, takes place 20 years after “To Kill a Mockingbird”; features an adult Scout, who has returned to Alabama from New York to visit an aging Atticus. The plot setup seems to closely parallel Ms. Lee’s own life at the time she was writing, making her correspondence all the more intriguing. But Ms. Lee’s editor, Tay Hohoff, told her to recast the novel, setting it in Scout’s childhood. The resulting story was “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and has sold more than 40 million copies. 
 
 In the aftermath, Ms. Lee shrank from the public eye, and struggled to finish another book. Her correspondence with Mr. Caufield, who belonged to her coterie of New York friends, shows a complex, mercurial person who is fiercely loyal to her family and closest allies and witheringly condescending to those she feels aren’t worth her time. 
 
 She can be by turns prickly and flirtatious. (“Will you marry me this instant?” she demands in one letter.) She confides that a “preacher” wants to date her, and shares her bleak views on Presbyterian theology, “about the gloomiest Protestant dogma I know of,” and airs her suspicions that she is being gossiped about for her stance on civil rights: “I don’t trust myself to keep my mouth shut if I feel moved to express myself, thereon it will get out all over Monroeville that I am a member of the NAACP, which, God forbid. They already suspect this to be a fact anyway.” 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 In some letters she describes feeling alienated, creatively blocked and homesick for her Manhattan apartment, which she left to return to Monroeville to tend to her sick father: “I’ve been longing to get back for so many reasons, a major one being that as long as I have a roof over my head, a chair, a table and a typewriter, and no people, I can work. 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. Compare it with work I’ve done here — well, I feel like pulling a Mike and checking into a hotel. But it wouldn’t work in Monroeville. Monroeville would simply follow.” 
 
 Though apparently Ms. Lee wrote to friends constantly, little of the correspondence has come up for auction, mainly because her friends are fiercely protective of her wish for privacy. The largest collection to sell was a cache of 13 letters that she wrote to a fan, Don Salter, who sold them through an online auction house in 2011. Few have been as intimate and revealing as the letters being auctioned at Christie’s. 
 
 “What we have in this archive is a deep and unguarded correspondence,” said Tom Lecky, who heads Christie’s department of books and manuscripts. “She’s not putting on a persona.” 
 
 Or if she is, it’s a teasing one — she occasionally uses silly pseudonyms like Francesca da Rimini and the Prisoner of Zenda. 
 
 As more of her contemporaries die — Ms. Lee turned 89 in April — additional letters could surface. Her letters to Mr. Caufield were sold after his death by a member of Mr. Caufield’s family to Erik DuRon, a rare-books dealer, in 2011. The dealer contacted a California book collector, Paul Kennerson, a retired trial lawyer who had bought a first edition of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” 
 
 Mr. Kennerson, 74, snapped up the collection, and about four years later he is auctioning the letters at Christie’s. He said that in 2012 he wrote to Harper Lee to inform her that he had her letters, addressing it to the postmaster in Monroeville. He never heard back. 
 
 The biographer Charles J. Shields, author of “Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee,” said finding personal correspondence by Ms. Lee is “about as rare as a meteor hitting the earth.” 
 
 “They’re precious, because she published so little,” Mr. Shields said. “The downside is that it may break the seal on a lot of questions she doesn’t want answered. It’s going to cheapen her legacy if personal letters keep popping up all the time.” 
 
 Ms. Lee’s publisher, Michael Morrison, the president of HarperCollins, said that he expects she will be unhappy to hear that her private letters are being sold. Ms. Lee “is a deeply private person, and I’m sure she would be disappointed that letters she wrote to a friend are being sold as some sort of memorabilia,” Mr. Morrison said through a HarperCollins spokeswoman. 
 
 In a month, the rest of the public will finally be able to read more of Ms. Lee’s writing. “Go Set a Watchman” comes out on July 14, with a first printing of two million copies.
– The reclusive Harper Lee reportedly wrote to friends a lot in her younger days, but few letters have "trickled out" because of her desire for privacy, as the New York Times puts it. That changed today when six she wrote to friend Harold Caufield between 1956 and 1961—before and after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird—went up for auction at Christie's. It turned out that the letters, now in the possession of a book collector, failed to sell, reports AP. (The expected price was $250,000; the bidding didn't hit the reserve price.) But we still get to read snippets, from AP, the Times, and the Los Angeles Times: 'Mockingbird success: "We were surprised, stunned & dazed by the Princeton review. The procurator of Judea is breathing heavily down my neck—all that lovely, lovely money is going straight to the Bureau of Internal Revenue tomorrow." On her dad, the model for Atticus Finch: "Daddy is sitting beside me at the kitchen table. ... I found myself staring at his handsome old face, and a sudden wave of panic flashed through me, which I think was an echo of the fear and desolation that filled me when he was nearly dead. It has been years since I have lived with him on a day-to-day basis." Small-town life: “I don’t trust myself to keep my mouth shut if I feel moved to express myself, thereon it will get out all over Monroeville that I am a member of the NAACP, which, God forbid. They already suspect this to be a fact anyway.” She also complains of the town's "ecclesiastical gloom." The lot included an inscribed 35th anniversary copy of the book: "Hal: Can you believe it?? You've lived to see this, and still have all your teeth and gumption. You will always be my beloved friend, hairless though you are." Lee's controversial second novel, Go Set a Watchmen, is out next month.