Best Selling Books by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The Story of a Bad Boy (1870) is a semi-autobiographical novel by American writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich, fictionalizing his experiences as a boy in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The book is considered the first in the "bad boy" genre of literature, though the text''s opening lines admit that he was "not such a very bad, but a pretty bad boy"."Tom Bailey" is born in the fictitious town of Rivermouth, New Hampshire, but moves to New Orleans with his family when he is 18 months old. In his boyhood, his father wants his to be educated in the North and sent him back to Rivermouth to live with his grandfather, Captain Nutter. Nutter lives with his sister and an Irish servant. There, Tom becomes a member of a boys'' club called the Centipedes. Together, the boys become involved in a series of adventures. In one prank, the boys steal an old carriage and push it into a bonfire for the [Fourth of July. During the winter, several boys build a snow fort on Slatter''s Hill, inciting rival boys into a battle of snowballs. Later, Tom and three other boys combine their money to buy a boat named Dolphin and sneak away to an island. Tom also befriends

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This is the story of a bad boy. Well, not such a very bad, but a pretty bad boy; and I ought to know, for I am, or rather I was, that boy myself.

It is close upon daybreak. The great wall of pines and hemlocks that keep off the west wind from Stillwater stretches black and indeterminate against the sky. At intervals a dull, metallic sound, like the guttural twang of a violin string, rises form the frog-invested swamp skirting the highway. Suddenly the birds stir in their nests over there in the woodland, and break into that wild jargoning chorus with which they herald the advent of a new day. In the apple-orchards and among the plum-trees of the few gardens in Stillwater, the wrens and the robins and the blue-jays catch up the crystal crescendo, and what a melodious racket they make of it with their fifes and flutes and flageolets! The village lies in a trance like death. Possibly not a soul hears this music, unless it is the watchers at the bedside of Mr. Leonard Tappleton, the richest man in town, who has lain dying these three days, and cannot last until sunrise. Or perhaps some mother, drowsily hushing her wakeful baby, pauses a moment and listens vacantly to the birds singing. But who else?

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