[1] It was published in book form a year later[2] by Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co.[3] It was republished in 1895 by Houghton, Mifflin and Company with illustrations by A.

[6] A precursor was Horatio Alger, Jr.'s "Ragged Dick" series beginning in 1868,[9] though scholar Kenneth B. Kidd says his works are generally excluded from the list.

[10] Aldrich also owed inspiration to the popular British book Tom Brown's School Days (1857) by Thomas Hughes.

[1] Though it has also been compared to the "girls book" genre initiated by Louisa May Alcott in Little Women, The Story of a Bad Boy does not have a single overarching narrative and is instead a series of sketches.

[13] Aldrich established the precedent that, generally, bad boy stories do not depict the characters' maturation to adulthood, though there is some evidence that they do grow up.

In the case of The Story of a Bad Boy, Aldrich notes early in the book that the characters are now adults and serving as "lawyers, merchants, sea-captains, soldiers, authors, what not.

"[15] Scholar Andrew Levy suggests that Twain was downplaying his interest in the book and was driven to disdain it in private due to "a competitive pique".