In a letter to his friend William Dean Howells in 1877 (quoted by biographer Ron Powers in
Mark Twain: A Life), Twain confessed: "I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got, & may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS [manuscript] when it is done." Fortunately, Twain did not burn the manuscript; when it was published in England in 1884 (U.S. publication 1885), it quickly became the most successful book Twain had yet written.
Soon after it was published, the public library in Concord, Massachusetts, refused to carry The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because of its perceived crudeness. This ban turned into a publicity coup for Twain and his book. In a letter published in the Hartford Courant, the author responds gratefully, noting that "one book in a public library prevents the sale of a sure ten and a possible hundred of its mates." Twain also notes that the library's newsworthy action
will cause the purchasers of the book to read it, out of curiosity, instead of merely intending to do so … and then they will discover, to my great advantage and their own indignant disappointment, that there is nothing objectionable in the book after all.
