A year later Hemingway was back in Paris, where he wrote some of his best short stories and told Scott Fitzgerald that, of the new material, "Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted River" were superior. Over the next six months, one of his most productive periods according to critic Jackson Benson, he wrote eight short stories. The stories were combined with the earlier vignettes and sent to Boni & Liveright in New York toward the end of the year. In March he was in Schruns, Austria when the acceptance cable and $100 advance arrived, with a request to option his next two books. Directly afterward, he received a letter from Max Perkins of Scribner's, who had read Bird's Paris edition and thought it lacked commercial appeal, and queried whether the young writer had stories to offer to bolster the collection. In his reply, Hemingway explained that he had already entered a contract with Boni & Liveright. When he received the contract for the book, Boni & Liveright requested that "Up in Michigan" be dropped for fear it might be censored; in response Hemingway wrote "The Battler" to replace the earlier story.