Lee, who died in 2016, struggled her whole life to tell this story of disillusionment, but in 1960 it was not the story American readers wanted. Instead of an account of a New Yorker’s return to her Southern hometown and her reckoning with the prejudices there, “To Kill a Mockingbird” — in a form heavily reworked by her editor, Tay Hohoff — became an idealized tale of a noble lawyer striving for justice in the face of rural bigotry.