The Biographical Dictionary of America/Aldrich, Thomas Bailey

ALDRICH, Thomas Bailey, poet and novelist, was born at Portsmouth, N. H., Nov. 11, 1837. Until he was thirteen he spent a part of each year in New Orleans, after which he made his home with his grandfather at Portsmouth, and in 1853 went to New York to begin his business life. He entered a counting-house, and began to write for publication, and his ballad of "Baby Bell," which appeared in a newspaper when the author was nineteen years old, was copied and quoted so widely that he immediately attained a literary reputation. He abandoned commercial for literary pursuits, and quickly gained prominence as a writer. He contributed to the leading magazines and the New York papers, and in 1856 filled a place on the editorial staff of the New York Home Journal. In 1865 Mr. Aldrich removed to Boston to assume the editorship of Every Saturday. This periodical ceased to exist in 1874, and he became a regular contributor to and, in 1881, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, resigning that position in 1892, to apply himself to general literary work. He became as well known in other English-speaking countries as America. Several of his prose books were translated into French, Spanish, German, and Danish. Hawthorne wrote of it: "I have been reading some of Aldrich's poems this evening. I find them rich, sweet and imaginative in such a degree that I am sorry not to have fresher sympathies, in order to taste all the delights that every reader ought to draw from them. I was conscious here and there of a delicacy that I hardly dared to breathe upon." He married in 1865 Lillian Woodman, of New York, and they resided on Mt. Vernon street in Boston, with summer homes at Ponkapog, Mass., and on the Maine coast. He received the honorary degree of A.M. from Yale in 1881, and from Harvard in 1896, and Litt.D. from Yale in October, 1901. He is the author of the following books: "The Bells: A Collection of Chimes" (1855); "Daisy's Necklace, and What Came of It" (1857), "The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth" (1858); "The Ballad of Babie Bell and Other Poems" (1859); "Pampinea and Other Poems" (1861); "Out of his Head" (1862); "Poems" (1863); "The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich" (1865); "Père Antoine's Date Palm" (1866); "Pansy's Wish: A Christmas Fantasy" (1870); "The Story of a Bad Boy" (1870); "Marjory Daw and Other People" (1873); "Cloth of Gold and Other Poems" (1874); "Prudence Palfrey" (1874); "Later Poems" (1876); "Flower and Thorn" (1877); "The Queen of Sheba" (1877); "The Stillwater Tragedy" (1880); "Friar Jerome's Beautiful Book" (1881); "The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich" (1882); "From Ponkapog to Pesth" (1883); "Mercedes and Later Lyrics" (1884); "The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich" (1885); "The Second Son" (1888); "Wyndham Towers" (1890); "The Sister's Tragedy: with Other Poems, Lyrical and Dramatic" (1891); "An Old Town by the Sea" (1893); "Two Bites at a Cherry; with Other Tales" (1894); "Unguarded Gates and Other Poems" (1895); "Judith and Holofernes" (1896).