Thomas Bailey Aldrich was raised in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which served as the setting for many of his literary works. In 1852, lacking the funds to attend Harvard, he moved to New York to work as a clerk in his uncle’s business. He soon began to publish poems, and joined the editorial staffs of several journals. During 1861–62 he was Civil War correspondent for the New York Tribune. In 1865 he married Lilian Woodman and moved to Boston to become editor of Every Saturday, a post he held through 1874. He replaced William Dean Howells as editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1881, and continued in that influential position until 1890. SLC first met Aldrich, after corresponding for some months, in November 1871. The two enjoyed a lifelong friendship. SLC said he “could not admire” Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy (1869) but it is clearly a model for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In his autobiography SLC praised Aldrich’s brilliant conversation, remarking that he had no peer for “pithy and witty and humorous sayings.”