An Old Town By The Sea

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on November 11, 1836. His family moved to New Orleans when he was a child and he only returned to Portsmouth in preparation for college. He describes this period of his life in his semi-autobiographical novel The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), in which "Tom Bailey" is the juvenile hero. This novel contains one of the first realistic depictions of childhood in American fiction. With his collection of stories entitled Marjorie Daw and Other People (1873), Aldrich wrote with realism and humor. His novels Prudence Palfrey (1874), The Queen of Sheba (1877), and The Stillwater Tragedy (1880) were more dramatically based. In An Old Town by the Sea (1893), Aldrich returned once more to the town of his birth for inspiration. Thomas Bailey Aldrich died in Boston on March 19, 1907. His last words were “In spite of it all, I am going to sleep; put out the lights."