"HUCKLEBERRY FINN"
young man named E. W. Kemble, who would later become one of our foremost illustrators of Southern character. He also gave attention to the selection of the paper and the binding—even to the method of canvassing for the sales. In a note to Webster, he wrote:
Get at your canvassing early and drive it with all your might. . . . If we haven't 40,000 subscriptions we simply postpone publication till we've got them.
Mark Twain was making himself believe that he was a business man, and in this instance, at least, he seems to have made no mistake. Some advanced chapters of Huck appeared serially in the Century Magazine, and the public was eager for more. By the time the Century chapters were finished the forty thousand advance subscriptions for the book had been taken, and Huck Finn's own story, so long pushed aside and delayed, came grandly into its own. Many grown-up readers and most critics declared that it was greater than the Tom Sawyer book, though the younger readers generally like the first book the best, it being rather more in the juvenile vein. Huck's story, in fact, was soon causing quite grown-up discussions—discussions as to its psychology and moral phases, matters which do not interest small people, who are always on Huck's side in everything, and quite willing that he should take any risk of body or soul for the sake of Nigger Jim. Poor, vagrant Ben Blankenship, hiding his runaway negro in an Illinois swamp, could not dream that his
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