The Story of a Bad Boy

A New England boyhood in the 1840s: a boy sent from New Orleans to his grandfather's town, and the pranks, the fights, the theatricals and the drowning that make a year. Aldrich called his hero a bad boy to mean an ordinary one, and said plainly that he was writing his own childhood. The book came out seven years before "Tom Sawyer" and Twain knew it well; the schoolroom, the burning stagecoach and the cannon are all here first. Twenty-seven paintings by Winslow Homer and Alfred Sisley carry the harbours, dories and children of a New England boyhood across the plates.