“There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.”
About Thomas Bailey Aldrich
11 November 1836–19 March 1907
In the pantheon of American letters, Thomas Bailey Aldrich occupies a curious position—neither forgotten nor fully celebrated, he stands as a bridge figure between the rough-hewn democracy of antebellum American literature and the refined aestheticism that would characterize the Gilded Age. Born into a nation still…