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To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
HARTFORD, July 5th, 1875.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I have finished the story and didn't take the chap
beyond boyhood. I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but
autobiographically--like Gil Blas. I perhaps made a mistake in not
writing it in the first person. If I went on, now, and took him into
manhood, he would just like like all the one-horse men in literature and
the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him. It is not a boy's
book, at all. It will only be read by adults. It is only written for
adults.
Moreover the book is plenty long enough as it stands. It is about 900
pages of MS, and may be 1000 when I shall have finished "working
up" vague places; so it would make from 130 to 150 pages of the
Atlantic--about what the Foregone Conclusion made, isn't it?
I would dearly like to see it in the Atlantic, but I doubt if it would
pay the publishers to buy the privilege, or me to sell it. Bret Harte
has sold his novel (same size as mine, I should say) to Scribner's
Monthly for $6,500 (publication to begin in September, I think,) and he
gets a royalty of 7 1/2 per cent from Bliss in book form afterwards.
363
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