Looks like abebooks has one copy priced reasonably if you really want it! http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=6435126200&searchurl=sts%3Dt%26tn%3Dmore%2Badventures%2Bof%2Bhuckleberry Mine doesn't have the dust jacket- too bad! My Tom Sawyer Grows Up does. ________________________________ From: Sam Sackett <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Thursday, November 1, 2012 2:14 PM Subject: Twain and Howe Mark Twain and Edgar Watson Howe have three points of contact: 1. When Ed Howe self-published The Story of a Country Town (1883), he sent= a copy of it to Mark Twain. Twain wrote Howe a letter of enthusiastic pra= ise and gave permission to Howe to quote it. Lytle Biggs, one of the chara= cters in the novel, speaks in satiric quips which foreshadow Twain's Pudd'n= head Wilson (1894). 2. In 1885 the New York World jocularly proposed that Twain should run for= president, with Howe as his vice-president. 3. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) Twain briefly describes a circ= us performance in which a pretended drunken man performs amazing stunts whi= le standing on the back of a trotting horse and is then revealed as a circu= s performer. In Howe' autobiography, Plain People (1929) he describes havi= ng seen just such a performance in the Miles Orton Circus, which played in = Bethany, MO, in about 1863; Howe's short story "When the Circus Came to Tow= n," which appeared in the American Magazine in 1911 and was reprinted as "D= octor Gilkerson" in The Anthology of Another Town (1920), describes the sam= e performance. When I was assigned to write the Twayne United States Authors Series volume= on E.W. Howe, there was no full-length biography of Howe in existence exce= pt for his own autobiography, which I thought might not be sufficiently det= ailed or reliable. Calder Pickett's biography had not been published. So = I set to work accumulating the information to write a biography. In 1965 I went to Bethany, where Howe grew up, and to nearby Fairview, wher= e his father was preacher. I spent several days in Atchison, KS, interview= ing people who had known Howe -- and discovering that most of them wouldn't= talk to Pickett because he had offended them by an article on Howe he had = written. I spent many hours in the office of the Atchison Globe reading th= e files of the paper when Howe had edited it. I had an extensive correspon= dence with Howe's son, the late Jim Howe; I spoke many times with Howe's ni= ece, Adelaide Howe, who had been his housekeeper and was living then in the= house Howe had lived in. I acquired photocopies of all of Howe's correspo= ndence then available. I read everything Howe had published. I scoured al= l available secondary sources. And then I wrote the biography, about 200 pages long. But the TUSAS format= limited me to 25 pages of biography, so I condensed what I had. Pickett's= biography came out in 1968, and I was disappointed. He had not done more = than half the research I had done, and he made the incorrect assumption tha= t Howe had not changed his opinions in the 84 years of his life. His book = was badly organized and poorly written. But since it existed, there was no= t then any possibility that I could publish my full-length biography. My T= USAS volume came out in 1972. Recently I made an effort to find a publisher for my biography, since Picke= tt's was out of print. Nobody was interested. Mine still needs more tidyi= ng up, but there's no point in working further on it since I cannot publish= it. So I have decided to make my draft available, free and uncopyrighted,= to anyone who might want to read it. If you'd like to have a copy, e-mail= me at [log in to unmask], and I'll send it to you as an e-mail attac= hment. You can download it and read it as an e-book, you can print it off and bind= it, you can forward it to people you know who might be interested. If you= are a library, you can catalog it as an e-book, or you can print it and pu= t it on your shelves. =20 Sam Sackett http://samsackett.us http://about.me/www.samsackett.com