May 26 Tuesday – Joel Chandler Harris’ unsigned review of Huck Finn ran in the Atlanta Constitution (p4, cols 2-3) [Griska 585]. In answering those critics who had followed lockstep with the Concord Library’s indictment of the book as “coarse, crude and inartistic,” Harris pointed out the falseness of that view and the true value of the book:

It is the story of a half illiterate, high spirited boy whose adventures are related by himself. The art with which this conception is dealt with is perfect in all its details. The boy’s point of view is never for a moment lost sight of, and the moral of the whole is that this half illiterate boy can be made to present, with perfect consistency, not only the characters of the people whom he meets, but an accurate picture of their social life. From the artistic point of view, there is not a coarse nor vulgar suggestion from the beginning to the end of the book. Whatever is coarse and crude is in the life that is pictured, and the picture is perfect. It may be said that the humor is sometimes excessive. But it is genuine humor—and the moral of the book, though it is not scrawled across every page, teaches the necessity of manliness and self-sacrifice.

Note: Harris sent a clipping of this review to Sam along with a short note on June 1, 1885.

Sam was in New York and spent time chatting with General Grant.

To-day talked with General Grant about his & my first Missouri campaign in 1861 (in June or July.) He surprised an empty camp near Florida, Mo., on Salt river, which I had been occupying a day or two before. How near he came to playing the devil with his future publisher! [MTNJ 3: 153].

(It is curious & dreadful to sit up this way & talk cheerful nonsense to Gen. Grant & he under sentence of death with that cancer. He says he has made the book too large by 200 pages—not a bad fault—a short time ago we were afraid it would lack 400 of being enough. He has dictated 10,000 words at a single sitting, & he is a sick man! It kills me these days to do half of it! [MTNJ 3: 152].