<P> The fictional town of Rivermouth is based on Portsmouth, New Hampshire . After Aldrich's death in 1907, the author's widow purchased the home where the book takes place and restored it to look as it did in 1850 . It has been a house museum open to the public since 1909, now part of Strawbery Banke . </P> <P> The book is considered the foundational text in a genre of "bad boy" literature which also includes Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Charles Dudley Warner's Being a Boy (1877), William Dean Howells's A Boy's Town (1877), James Otis Kaler's Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus (1877), Hamlin Garland's Boy Life on the Prairie (1899), and Booth Tarkington's Penrod (1913). A precursor was Horatio Alger, Jr.'s "Ragged Dick" series beginning in 1868, though scholar Kenneth B. Kidd says his works are generally excluded from the list . Aldrich also owed inspiration to the popular British book Tom Brown's School Days (1857) by Thomas Hughes . The bad boy genre, intended to be read by both children and adults, shows boys as irrational, primitive, and masculine . </P> <P> Though the main character is relatively mild (something that Aldrich himself admits in the book's opening lines), The Story of a Bad Boy was the first to celebrate a misbehaving boy as protagonist rather than antagonist . Contemporary reviews hailed the book as a departure in traditional children's literature . The book was praised for showing the true life of a boy, rather than dictating what it ought to be . Ultimately, the story shows that a young troublemaker can grow up to become a successful adult . Though it has also been compared to the "girls book" genre initiated by Louisa May Alcott in Little Women, The Story of a Bad Boy does not have a single overarching narrative and is instead a series of sketches . Aldrich established the precedent that, generally, bad boy stories do not depict the characters' maturation to adulthood, though there is some evidence that they do grow up . In the case of The Story of a Bad Boy, Aldrich notes early in the book that the characters are now adults and serving as "lawyers, merchants, sea - captains, soldiers, authors, what not ." </P> <P> Twain, in particular, was heavily influenced by the book, though he was not originally impressed . He once wrote to his wife Livy, "I started to mark the Story of a Bad Boy, but for the life of me I could not admire the volume much ." Scholar Andrew Levy suggests that Twain was downplaying his interest in the book and was driven to disdain it in private due to "a competitive pique". Twain later determined that Aldrich was the wittiest man in the past seven centuries . </P>

Story of a bad boy by thomas bailey aldrich