August 10 Wednesday – In Bad Nauheim Sam wrote to Frederick J. 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) & their friend the freed slave Jim around the world in a stray balloon, with Huck as narrator…. I have written 12,000 words of this narrative….so I shall go along & make a book of from 50,000 to 100,000 words.

It is a story for boys, of course, & I think will interest any boy between 8 years & 80.

Sam wrote of the offer made by Mary Mapes Dodge for such a book when he was recently in New York (See July 22). He proposed the title to be “New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (this became Tom Sawyer Abroad). Sam asked Hall to shop the book idea to Henry Alden of Harper’s, Samuel S. McClure, and to write Howells [MTLTP 313-5].