Albert Bigelow Paine

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”