In a letter to William Dean Howells (July 5, 1875), Mark Twain tells of just completing the manuscript for "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (written in the third person) and deciding against taking Tom into adulthood: to do so, he says, "would be fatal ... in any shape but autobiographically – like Gil Blas". Scholar Walter Blair in "Mark Twain and Huck Finn" (1960) thus concludes that Twain's new novel, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", which, picaresque-like, "would run its protagonist 'through life', had to be written in the first person; "Gil Blas" was the model".