The Story of a Bad Boy

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was an American author, poet, critic, and editor who lived from November 11, 1836, to March 19, 1907. His long tenure as editor of The Atlantic Monthly, during which time he published authors like Charles W. Chesnutt, is noteworthy. The Story of a Bad Boy, a semi-autobiographical novel by him that popularized the "bad boy's book" subgenre in nineteenth-century American literature, and his poetry were other works for which he was renowned. The English language is too sacred a thing to be damaged and vulgarized, he remarked in a letter from 1900, citing modern poet James Whitcomb Riley. He started working in his uncle's New York office when he was 16 years old and soon started contributing regularly to newspapers and periodicals. Early in the 1860s, Aldrich became friends with a number of notable young poets, painters, and intellectuals in the metropolitan bohemia, including Edmund Clarence Stedman, Richard Henry Stoddard, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Bayard Taylor, and Walt Whitman. Aldrich worked for the Home Journal, which was later edited by Nathaniel Parker Willis, from 1856 until 1859. He was the editor of the New York Illustrated News during the Civil War. Aldrich has two boys after marrying Lilian Woodman of New York in 1865.