Thomas Bailey Aldrich Biography

Questions on this topic? Just ask!

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Thomas Bailey Aldrich is remembered only for his one children's novel, The Story of a Bad Boy (1869). He was, however, one of the most respected literary men of his time. Ranked with William Dean Howells and Mark Twain as a novelist and with James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier as a poet, he was also junior literary critic of the Evening Mirror, subeditor of Home Journal, associate editor of Saturday Press, and editor of the Illustrated News, Every Saturday, and the Atlantic Monthly. He was acquainted with or knew well many artists influential during the late nineteenth century, including the famous Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, the sculptor Launt Thompson, the painter Bierstadt, Walt Whitman, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickens, Howells, and Twain. Although only his minor children's classic survives, Aldrich lived and died at the center of the late-nineteenth-century literary world. But perhaps more interesting than the reasons why most of Aldrich's writing is now forgotten are the reasons why The Story of a Bad Boy still lives.

Read the rest of this Biography with our Thomas Bailey Aldrich Access Pass.