George William Curtis to Charles Eliot Norton, March 25, 1862

25th March.

Fletcher Harper has asked me to take into consideration the writing of a history, a chronicle of the war, to be illustrated by the war pictures of the "Weekly," a huge (in size) book for popular reading, and to be especially a Northern book, to show what the Rebellion came from, and what its end would probably be! That is not bad for Mr. Harper. I told him that if I wrote about the Rebellion I should want to write a proper history; that his work, though admirable in intention, could be but a ‘job’ for me; that the study would be useful to any subsequent work upon the subject, but that the public never could believe that the later was more than a hash of the earlier. He said that I could easily do it in three months, and he would pay me well, and begged me to think it over.¹

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¹ The book was not undertaken.

SOURCE: Edward Cary, George William Curtis, p. 154