The best story for boys is the one that will help them most and give them the greatest pleasure—the story that will make them more manly, more self reliant, more generous, more noble and sweeter in disposition. Such a story I have aimed to make The Boy Broker. The moral or lesson it contains could be put into a very short lecture, but as a lecture I am confident that it would prove valueless. Boys are benefited little by advice. They seldom listen to it and less frequently make any practical application of it. Imitative by nature, they are easily influenced by those with whom they associate, and no associate, in my opinion, has so strong a grasp upon them as the hero of some much prized book. He becomes a real being to their young, healthy imagination—their ideal of manliness, bravery, generosity, and nobility. He enters into their lives, their sports, their adventures, their kind acts, a companion, a model so much idealized and admired that unconsciously they grow to be like him in so far as their surroundings will permit. In a good story plot and action are but the setting to the gem—the means of conveying a lesson in disguise in such a way that the reader will not suspect he is being taught. Let it once occur to him that he is reading a lecture and the book will at once be quietly but most effectually packed away. Many authors, it seems to me, fail in their purpose by devoting too much time to the gem and too little to the setting. Others go too far the other way and write stories that give young readers a wrong idea of life—stories whose heroes do improbable and unnatural acts. While my purpose has been to make The Boy Broker interesting I have aimed to give a true idea of life in a great city. So much nonsense of a misleading character has been written about benevolent old gentlemen who help poor boys from the country that I have sought to turn the light of fact on the subject and picture a little real life—about such life as a boy may expect to find if he comes to New York friendless and alone. He might find it much worse; he could not wisely hope to find it better.

Frank A. Munsey.
New York, September, 1888.