Garrison Keillor

"Upon the border of a remote and out-of-the-way village in south-western Missouri lived an old farmer named John Gray..."In 1876, the same year The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published, Mark Twain wrote a story for The Atlantic Monthly. He meant it as a "blind novelette"—a challenge to other writers to submit their own ending of the story in a national competition. Twain asked his editor at The Atlantic to request submissions from leading...