THE Group for Authors! discussion

I'm convinced the success of Mark Twain and his ability to connect with readers a hundred years after his death is partially due to the fact that he wrote kids stories adults love to read. It's the subject of a blog post I just wrote and would love to hear your opinion and get some feed back. Follow the link: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

I don't know if I can agree. I think "children's stories" may be too simplified a description. There's a genre that he may have had in mind when he said "boys and girls" that we don't really hear much mention of today. I think it's currently referred to as "juvenile" fiction. That would put it beyond the age of "children's" and prior to the modern "young adult."

If you think about it, there's something magical about that time period. It's a time of transition, when we stop being a little kid, enter puberty, and start on the road toward being a grown-up. A lot of changes occur physically and mentally. Things that impress us in that time period seem to stick with us for life. It's when we adopt our first real heroes, have our first crush, and have our first serious thoughts about who we are and who want to be when we grow up.

Two other authors who had enormous success with tales about and for that age group are Stephen King and Robert A. Heinlein. Stephen King's first published book was Carrie, about a girl in high school. Later, his story The Body was made into the film Stand By Me, featuring kids in the 12-14 age range. Many people who love that movie comment on how it took them back in time to when they were that age.

Heinlein didn't have any one hugely successful book aimed at the juvenile market that I can recall, but he built his career writing "juveniles." That made his later works possible, such as Stranger in a Strange Land, and others that were made into movies, such as The Puppet Masters and Starship Troopers.

Although I loved Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the greater reason for my worship of Twain is his decidedly less juvenile stories, like my favorite, Letters From Earth.

To me, he was a brilliant genius who observed humanity and found it lacking. It's his social criticism that I most relate to and which endears him to me. He included his skewering of man in stories that were easy to read and relate to. I think he may have also wanted to remind us of what we once were because it is the way we change that is a large part of what is wrong with society, then and now. And it's easily remedied, if we could get back in touch with who we were before.

I wrote a tribute to indie authors (of which, Twain was one of the very first) about storytellers, going back to the beginning of time. It features several fictional authors and one real one in a fictional portrayal - and that one was Samuel Clemens.

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(I posted the comment I wrote on your blog because of the likelihood of it never being seen there. Most of my blog posts are rarely viewed, and I don't know if that's just me, or the norm in this place of allegedly millions of readers.)