Remembered chiefly for his realistic novels of boarding-school life, Talbot Baines Reed was among the most influential boys' writers of his generation. Reed was never a full-time author, and his writing career lasted barely more than a decade, but he produced thirteen novels, in addition to sketches, articles, and scholarly publications on the history of printing.

Reed's works played a crucial role in the late-nineteenth-century movement of boys' books away from religious didacticism toward a morally sensitive realism. In his serials for the Boy's Own Paper, Reed perfected the school novel as a genre--boarding-school life, athletic achievement, schoolboy conflict and adventure--creating a formula followed for the next fifty years or more. In a 1914 essay on the genre, Ian Hay comments that Reed's school novels "have never been bettered ... anybody who has ever attempted to write a tale which shall be probable yet interesting, and racy yet moral, will...