Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Thomas Bailey Aldrich ( born November 11, 1836 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, † March 19, 1907 in Boston, Massachusetts) was an American writer, poet and editor.
Life
Career
Aldrich grew first few years in New Orleans, before he returned after ten years in his native town, to prepare for a visit to a college. His father's death in 1852, however, led to the fact that he gave up the plan of attending a college, and instead worked in a business operating in New York City. Soon after, he wrote as a permanent employee articles for newspapers and magazines, and was also a close friend of many young poets, artists and thinkers of the bohemian city in the 1860s as Edmund Clarence Stedman, Richard Henry Stoddard, Bayard Taylor and Walt Whitman.
Between 1856 and 1859 he was an employee, edited by Nathaniel Parker Willis Home Journal before he was editor of the New York Illustrated News during the Civil War.
In 1865, he moved to Boston and was responsible for the then major publishing Ticknor and Fields to 1875 editor of the eclectic weekly Every Saturday. Later he was 1881-1890 editor of the famous magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, as well as literary critic of The New York Evening Mirror.
Writing career
In addition to his professional career, Aldrich started early on his literary activity. In 1855 he made his literary debut with the anthology The Bells, who with The Ballad of Baby Bell ( 1856), Pampinea, and other Poems (1861 ), Judith and Holofernes (1862 ) and Friar Jerome 's Beautiful Book ( 1862) was followed by further volumes of poetry. 1865 appeared beyond his collected works first time.
Width achieved notoriety in 1870 with The Story of a Bad Boy. In this autobiographical novel, he described the first years of his life, lived in the " Tom Bailey ", the young hero of the book in the "River Mouth" renamed city Porthsmouth.
After a collection of short stories entitled Marjorie Daw and Other People (1873 ) was followed with Cloth of Gold ( 1874) and Flower and Thorn (1876 ) further volumes of poetry and in 1882 a new collection of his works. With Mercedes and Later Lyrics (1883 ) and Wyndham Towers (1889 ) he published two further anthologies as well as in 1897 and 1900 two more volumes of collected works.
In his lyrical works showed his poetic talent of graceful feelings and imagination happier. He tried often without much success in narrative, dramatic poems as in his early work Garnaut Hall. Few other poets had, however, to describe individual images, moods, vanities or incidents talent like him. Among his most important poems include " Hesperides ", "When the Sultan goes to Ispahan ," " Before the Rain ", " Nameless Pain", " The Tragedy ," " Seadrift ", " Tiger Lilies ", " The One White Rose " " Palabras Carinosas ", " Destiny " or the eight-line poem " Identity ", which contributed more than all other works by "Baby Bell " to its reputation.
In the Marjorie Daw and Other People mentioned collection of short stories, he turned in his prose work, the accuracy of the composition to that already characterized his verses in which he chose a close, new or salient situation and this the reader in a pleasant combination of friendly realism and restrained humor recited.
His other works include the novels Prudence Palfrey (1874 ), The Queen of Sheba (1877 ) and The Stillwater Tragedy (1880, German title " The tragedy of Stillwater " ), all of which were characterized by a rapid sequence of actions. The pictures of his fictional hometown of River Mouth appeared thereby partially as well as in the shorter humorous story A Rivermouth Romance (1877 ) as well as in An Old Town by the Sea (1893 ), while travel reports were the subject of From Ponkapog to Pesth.
In Ponkapog Papers (1904 ), there are drafts, including the following:
Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door -bell!
This shortest history was known, because they published in a modified form in 1940 by Jorge Luis Borges, entitled Sola y su alma in Antología de la Literatura Fantástica and 1948 used by Fredric Brown as part of Knock.
In Aldrich's birth city of Portsmouth is a literary museum.