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Aug. 10, '92.
DEAR MR. HALL,--I have dropped that novel I wrote you about, because I
saw a more effective way of using the main episode--to wit: by telling
it through the lips of Huck Finn. So I have started Huck Finn and Tom
Sawyer (still 15 years old) and their friend the freed slave Jim around
the world in a stray balloon, with Huck as narrator, and somewhere after
the end of that great voyage he will work in the said episode and then
nobody will suspect that a whole book has been written and the globe
circumnavigated merely to get that episode in an effective (and at the
same time apparently unintentional) way. I have written 12,000 words
of this narrative, and find that the humor flows as easily as the
adventures and surprises--so I shall go along and make a book of from
5
0,000 to 100,000 words.
It is a story for boys, of course, and I think will interest any boy
between 8 years and 80.
When I was in New York the other day Mrs. Dodge, editor of St. Nicholas,
wrote and, offered me $5,000 for (serial right) a story for boys 50,000
words long. I wrote back and declined, for I had other matter in my
mind, then.
I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so
that it will not only interest boys but will also strongly interest any
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