"Credit for recognizing the boy book as a type is usually given to W.D. Howells, who observed in his review of Aldrich that 'no one else seems to have thought of telling the story of a boy's life, with so great desire to show what a boy's life is, and so little purpose of teaching what it should be.' Five years later Howells steered Mark Twain toward the conception of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) as 'a book for boys, pure & simple.'" Howells later contributed to the subgenre of realism with A Boy's Town (1890) and The Flight of Pony Baker (1902).
