page_title: Thomas Bailey Aldrich
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Bailey Aldrich / Biography / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Thomas Bailey Aldrich House, Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Now part of the Strawbery Banke Museum, it was built c. 1797
context_page_description: Thomas Bailey Aldrich was an American writer, poet, critic, and editor. He is notable for his long editorship of The Atlantic Monthly, during which he published writers including Charles W. Chesnutt. He was also known for his semi-autobiographical book The Story of a Bad Boy, which established the "bad boy's book" subgenre in nineteenth-century American literature, and for his poetry, which included "The Unguarded Gates".
context_section_description: Aldrich abandoned college preparations after his father's death in 1849. At age 16 in 1852, he entered his uncle's New York business office and became a constant contributor to the newspapers and magazines. Aldrich  befriended other young poets, artists and wits of the metropolitan bohemia of the early 1860s, including Edmund Clarence Stedman, Richard Henry Stoddard, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Bayard Taylor and Walt Whitman. From 1856 to 1859, Aldrich was on the staff of the Home Journal, then edited by Nathaniel Parker Willis. During the Civil War he was the editor of the New York Illustrated News.
  In 1865 Aldrich returned to New England. In Boston he edited the eclectic weekly literary magazine Every Saturday, published by Ticknor and Fields and successors (Field, Osgood; James R. Osgood & Co.; H. O. Houghton & Co.), throughout its run from 1866 to 1874. From 1881 to 1890, he edited The Atlantic Monthly, Boston's most important magazine. As editor of The Atlantic he created tension with his publisher H. O. Houghton by refusing to publish articles that Houghton commissioned from friends including Woodrow Wilson and Francis Marion Crawford. When Houghton chastised Aldrich for turning down submissions from his friend Daniel Coit Gilman, Aldrich threatened to resign and finally did so in June 1890.
  Meanwhile, Aldrich continued his private writing, both in prose and verse. His talent was many-sided. He was well known for his form in poetry. His successive volumes of verse, chiefly The Ballad of Babie Bell (1856), Pampinea, and Other Poems (1861), Cloth of Gold (1874), Flower and Thorn (1876), Friar Jerome's Beautiful Book (1881), Mercedes and Later Lyrics (1883), Wyndham Towers (1889), and the collected editions of 1865, 1882, 1897 and 1900, showed him to be a poet of lyrical skill and light touch. Critics believed him to show the influence of Robert Herrick.
  Aldrich's longer narrative or dramatic poems were not as successful. Notable work includes such lyrics as "Hesperides", "When the Sultan Goes to Ispahan", "Before the Rain", "Nameless Pain", "The Tragedy", "Seadrift", "Tiger Lilies", "The One White Rose", "Palabras Cariñosas", "Destiny", and the eight-line poem "Identity".
  Beginning with the collection of stories entitled Marjorie Daw and Other People (1873), Aldrich wrote works of realism and quiet humor. His novels Prudence Palfrey (1874), The Queen of Sheba (1877), and The Stillwater Tragedy (1880) had more dramatic action. The first portrayed Portsmouth with the affectionate touch shown in the shorter humorous tale, A Rivermouth Romance (1877). In An Old Town by the Sea (1893), Aldrich commemorated his birthplace again. Travel and description are the theme of From Ponkapog to Pesth (1883).
caption: Thomas Bailey Aldrich House, part of Strawbery Banke Museum, Portsmouth, New Hampshire
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