The Story of a Bad Boy
by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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Description
The boyhood adventures of a mischievous lad in nineteenth-century New England are based on the author's own experiences.Tags
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Member Reviews
Aldrich's semi-autobiographical story is memorable for its portrayal of a boy's life in pre-Civil War New England. The book's fictional Rivermouth is actually Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The writing is about as good as it gets. Aldrich has a great eye for detail, writes clearly, and has a very engaging sense of dry humor. Every character comes to life in the telling, and the adventures and sorrows he portrays ring absolutely true. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to get a sense of what life was like during that time--but even more strongly, I recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good story and good writing. I'm so glad I stumbled across this book on munseys.com while looking for something else!
I can't say that the short novel (122 pages) was rip-roaring fun, but it was the amusing tale of a pre-pubescent boy in pre Civil War New England. I liked that it used some now obsolete words that I had not heard for sometime.
I generally love old books written for and/or about kids, but I got about a third of the way through this, and I was literally falling asleep. Next!
Charming story of the adventures of a young boy growing up in New England; one particular adventure ends tragically.
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Lists
Publisher's Weekly Bestsellers Prior to 1895 in Chronological Order
95 works; 6 members
CCE 1000 Good Books List
1,033 works; 12 members
Fiction (Mostly) in Selective Bibliography of American Literature 1775-1900
431 works; 3 members
Author Information
88+ Works 939 Members
A native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Thomas Bailey Aldrich lived during a time of great change in American literature. His literary conservatism and his resistance to the harsher outlooks of realism in part account for the neglect of him today. Nevertheless, his poetry and fiction were popular during his day, and he was a conscientious show more craftsman. At 16 he went to work in his uncle's New York countinghouse, but he spent his free time reading and writing poetry. His first published works, the sentimental "Ballad of Babie Bell" and The Bells (1855), a volume of verse, brought him immediate fame. He then devoted himself to literature. He became the editor of the weekly magazine, Every Saturday, and eventually of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly from 1881 to 1890. His mature lyrics were less sentimental than his early work, though he continued to follow the classical conventions of romantic poetry. His best short stories, particularly those collected in Marjorie Daw and Other Stories (1873) and Two Bites at a Cherry, with Other Tales (1894), show his use of regional local color, but his romantic plots rely on humor rather than realism for their appeal. Aldrich's first novel, The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), was unique in its depiction not of a "bad boy" but of a "natural boy," a type that anticipated Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. Aldrich's other novels, although popular, were not as successful. Even as he foresaw the change in literary taste that would doom his own reputation, he remained steadfast in preferring the pleasant to the realistic, the conventional to the modern. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Belongs to Publisher Series
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Story of a Bad Boy
- Original publication date
- 1869
- Important places
- Rivermouth
- First words
- This is the story of a bad-boy.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)So ends the Story of a Bad Boy -- but not such a very bad boy, as I told you to begin with.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 356
- Popularity
- 88,593
- Reviews
- 4
- Rating
- (3.72)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 35
- ASINs
- 23
