[Nancy Fulda]

Originally Posted by Harper Kingsley

I always just use "awhile." I think it's an Americanism, like "I could care less."

I was born and raised in the US, and "for awhile" still looks wrong for me, so at most it's a regional thing.

I think it's important to note that authors break grammatical rules all the time. Fiction, in particular, is full of sentence fragments and regional dialects used to increase the book's emotional effect.

Consider, for example, the first few paragraphs of Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Colors of Space:

The Lhari spaceport didn't belong on Earth.

Bart Steele had thought that, a long time ago, when he first saw it. He had been just a kid then; twelve years old, and all excited about seeing Earth for the first time—Earth, the legendary home of mankind before the Age of Space, the planet of Bart's far-back ancestors. And the first thing he'd seen on Earth, when he got off the starship, was the Lhari spaceport.

And he'd thought, right then, It doesn't belong on Earth.

Or the opening lines of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn:

YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

Twain and MZB are breaking the rules, but they're doing it deliberately, with an eye toward maintaining the rhythm of the narrative and the personality of the POV character. They're not breaking rules at random. They're going for a specific effect.

I submit that as an author, it's perfectly acceptable to break with established grammatical rules, but only if there is a clear stylistic benefit.

Continuing the discussion of awhile and a while, my impression is that most readers either (a) don't care or (b) prefer the usage presented by Harry. Assuming that's the case, then I see no inherent advantage in writing "for awhile", because it alienates some readers without increasing the book's enjoyability for anyone else.