What Twain sought was something like automation. He wanted to work without working, a desire hard to square with other writerly particularities of his: he was obsessive about word choice, especially when rendering dialect. And yet he often deferred to others—most often the women in his life—when it came to editing, allowing them to strike what they would.
His writing style was inseparable from the shape his books took, and his fictional instincts were more episodic than architectural. “A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel,” he once observed. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” was an illustration. Twain wrote much of it in the summer of 1874, as he and his wife prepared to move into a flamboyant Gothic mansion in Hartford, along with two young daughters and a household staff. But the life style came with costs, and one way to raise money was to advertise a book to prospective subscribers, who would pay for it in advance. Then you just had to write it.
At one point, work on the manuscript stalled completely. His tank, he wrote, “was empty; the stock of materials in it was exhausted; the story could not go on without materials; it could not be wrought out of nothing.” The freeze came around page 400—a reminder of the economics shaping Twain’s method. With subscription publishing, bulk helped justify the price. As his biographer Justin Kaplan put it, “It forced the author to write to fit and to fill . . . and it conditioned him to think of his writing as a measurable commodity, like eggs and corn.”
Published in 1876, “Tom Sawyer” was printed and distributed in the U.S. by a venture Twain partly owned. It sold respectably but not at the level he’d hoped. The Atlantic called it “a wonderful study of the boy-mind”; others dismissed it as a series of sketches rather than a true novel. Sardonic in tone—its moralists are hypocrites, the church oppressive, and only the rebels are appealing—the book still plays it safe: slavery is all but absent from this version of Hannibal.
Twain worked on “Huckleberry Finn” that summer, at a retreat in upstate New York. But the writing, again, proved fitful. He wrote a few hundred pages before pausing the project around 1880, unsure how to proceed. He was also busy chasing fortune: steam pulleys, marine telegraphs, and the Paige Compositor—a typesetting machine that promised riches and delivered bankruptcy. As Chernow notes, Twain “raged against plutocrats even as he strove to become one.”
