Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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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

Professional career

Aldrich grew up in New Orleans for a few years before returning to his hometown after ten years to prepare for college . However, his father's death in 1852 led him to abandon the plan of going to college and instead work in a business in New York City . Soon after, he was a permanent contributor to newspapers and magazines and became a close friend of numerous young poets, artists and thinkers of the bohemian cities of the 1860s such as Edmund Clarence Stedman , Richard Henry Stoddard , Bayard Taylor and Walt Whitman .

Between 1856 and 1859 he was a contributor to the Home Journal , edited by Nathaniel Parker Willis , before he was editor of the New York Illustrated News during the Civil War .

In 1865 he moved to Boston and was editor of the eclectic weekly Every Saturday for the then important publishing house Ticknor and Fields until 1875 . He was later editor of the well-known magazine The Atlantic Monthly and literary critic of The New York Evening Mirror between 1881 and 1890 . Since 1898 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Writing career

The Thomas Bailey Aldrich House in Portsmouth on a historic postcard from 1910

In addition to his professional career, Aldrich began his writing activity at an early age. In 1855 he made his literary debut with the anthology The Bells , which was followed by other volumes of poetry with The Ballad of Baby Bell (1856), Pampinea, and other Poems (1861), Judith and Holofernes (1862) and Friar Jerome's Beautiful Book (1862). In addition, his collected works appeared for the first time in 1865.

It was widely known in 1870 with The Story of a Bad Boy . In this autobiographical novel he described the first years of his life, in which "Tom Bailey", the book's youthful hero lived in the city of Portsmouth, renamed "Rivermouth".

After a collection of short stories with the title Marjorie Daw and Other People (1873) followed with Cloth of Gold (1874) and Flower and Thorn (1876) further volumes of poetry and in 1882 another collection of his works. With Mercedes and Later Lyrics (1883) and Wyndham Towers (1889) he published two further anthologies and in 1897 and 1900 two further volumes with collected works.

In his lyrical works his poetic gift of graceful feelings and happy imagination was shown. He often tried his hand at narrative, dramatic poems like in his early work Garnaut Hall without much success . Few other poets, however, had the talent to describe individual images, moods, vanities or incidents like him. 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 more than any other work after "Baby Bell" contributed to his reputation.

In the collection of short stories called Marjorie Daw and Other People , he also applied in his prosaic work the precision of composition that already shaped his verses by choosing a near, new or salient situation and presenting it to the reader in a pleasant combination of friendly realism and reserved humor.

His other works include the novels Prudence Palfrey (1874), The Queen of Sheba (1877) and The Stillwater Tragedy (1880, German title "Die Tragödie von Stillwater"), all of which were characterized by a more rapid plot sequence. The images of his fictional hometown Rivermouth appeared partly 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 draft texts, 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 brief history became known because it was published in a modified form in 1940 by Jorge Luis Borges under the title Sola y su alma in Antología de la Literatura Fantástica and used by Fredric Brown as part of Knock in 1948 .

In Portsmouth, Aldrich's birth town, there is a literary museum .

literature

  • Ferris Greenslet: The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich , 1908.
  • Charles E. Samuels: Thomas Bailey Aldrich , 1965.

Web links

Commons : Thomas Bailey Aldrich  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Perlentaucher.de
  2. ↑ An Old Town by the Sea (Google Books)
  3. ↑ Ponkapog Papers
  4. ↑ Antología de la Literatura Fantástica ( Memento of September 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.9 MB)
personal data
SURNAME Aldrich, Thomas Bailey
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author and editor
DATE OF BIRTH November 11, 1836
PLACE OF BIRTH Portsmouth , New Hampshire
DATE OF DEATH March 19, 1907
Place of death Boston , Massachusetts