Harper Lee was 31 when she took her first draft to publishers. Editor Tay Hohoff pushed her through revision after revision. One winter night, frustrated, Lee tossed the entire manuscript out her window. It landed in the snow. She called Hohoff in tears, ready to give up, but Hohoff persuaded her to retrieve the pages.

Lee rescued the draft, continued revising, and the book was published as "To Kill a Mockingbird." It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and become one of the most beloved novels in American literature.

After many years of attempting to publish his manuscript and many revisions, John Kennedy Toole gave it up as a failure. It remained neglected on top of his dresser with the rejection notices it had accumulated. Toole took his own life in 1969.

His mother spent a decade searching for a publisher. She finally found one — LSU Press, which received an NEA grant to publish it. Released in 1980, it sold over 50,000 copies in its first year and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981.

Austen wrote The Watsons after completing Northanger Abbey. The novel tells the story of four sisters, daughters of a widowed clergyman, trying to marry well. She stopped when her own father — also a clergyman — died in 1805. The situation she was writing about — being financially dependent on male relations — was about to happen to her.

The manuscript survived, though the first 12 pages were sold during WWI for Red Cross funds and are now in New York. The remaining fragment sold at Sotheby's in 2011 for nearly £1 million and now resides at Oxford's Bodleian Library.

Tremulis, a designer for Cord, Tucker, and Ford, later explored a two-wheeled gyroscopically balanced car — a design that would reduce fuel consumption and alleviate congestion. The company, Gyro Transport Systems Inc., spent $750,000 building one prototype. The company failed and the car disappeared for decades.

The prototype re-emerged and was bought by Jeff Lane of the Lane Motor Museum, who restored it and debuted it at Pebble Beach. Though the technology worked, it never found a market.

The 1981 Atari 2700 used wireless controllers — a development far ahead of its time. But the radio signals could trigger garage-door openers, and Atari couldn't pair controllers to specific consoles, causing interference between nearby systems.

The console was never released. About 75 prototypes are believed to have been made, but only 16 or 17 are known to exist today. The case design, however, lived on in future releases.

Engineer Paul M. Lewis designed the Aeromobile in the 1930s — a three-wheeled car with two wheels in front and one in back. He built a prototype and drove it over 45,000 miles across the country, searching for investors to produce it at just $500 during the Great Depression.

Despite the effort, investors never materialized. The Aeromobile became one of many bold but failed inventions, now remembered as a pioneering example of radical car design.

In 1999, Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to sell Google to Excite CEO George Bell for $1 million. Bell talked them down to $750,000 — then rejected the offer.

Just five months later, the pair raised $25 million. Today, Alphabet Google's market cap exceeds $1.6 trillion.

The Ring Doorbell began as Doorbot, crowdfunded in 2013. Founder Jamie Siminoff took it to Shark Tank, asking for $700,000. All the sharks rejected him.

By 2018, the company had exploded in popularity. Amazon acquired it for between $1.2 and $1.8 billion.

Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins has been upfront: the business was rejected by prospective investors over 100 times. Their first pitch deck was "pretty terrible."

The founders believed in the idea. Ten years later, Canva has raised $572.6 million and has a market cap of around $24 billion.

Arthur Agee and William Gates were both talented Chicago basketball players in 1987. Agee was invited to a camp at St. Joseph High School — the same school where his idol Isiah Thomas starred. Gates was one of the most promising young players in the city.

Agee was forced to leave St. Joseph when his family couldn't pay tuition. Gates starred but suffered a bad knee injury that kept him from his full potential. Agee went to junior college; Gates went to Marquette. Neither made the NBA.

Gates says: "I always wish that we would have made it. That feeling will never go away." Agee runs a Hoop Dreams clothing line; Gates is a preacher in San Antonio. They host a podcast together and are planning a sequel.

Lynch conceived dozens of projects that never got made: "Ronnie Rocket" (a detective who enters another dimension), "Snootworld" (an animated feature about tiny creatures), a biopic of Marilyn Monroe (killed by Warner Bros.), a Kafka adaptation, and many more.

Some were too expensive, some too strange, some simply fell through. "One Saliva Bubble" — written with Mark Frost about a chain reaction caused by a saliva bubble — was set to star Steve Martin and Martin Short before Dino De Laurentiis' company went bust.

Some elements found their way into other works. The Log Lady came from an unrealized interview show concept. But many of these projects remain exactly what they were: visions that almost came to be.

Chris Burden, known for extreme performances and intricate installations, planned over 60 works that never came to be. They included converting a WWII British destroyer into a ship with sails, hanging a fishing boat on the side of the Seattle Art Museum, and putting a Sputnik satellite replica into orbit.

The destroyer plan was blocked by price and preservation issues. The fishing boat met "vehement objections" from the museum's architect. The Sputnik launch was stymied by the complexity of a rocket launch.

A book, "Poetic Practical," documents these unrealized works, honoring "the amount of time, mind space, energy, efforts and brains that went into attempting to make these unrealized projects." The book offers a moving history of his life and the research behind his art.