Other editions of book A boy's town

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.

The question of the identity of 'A Boy's Town', has excited almost as much interest, in a certain section of our country, as the long-discussed question of the birthplace of Homer. That Mr. Howells is his own Boy there can be no doubt. But Mr. Howells, according to the biographies, was born at Martin's Ferry in 1837. The family moved to Hamilton when he was three years of age, to Dayton when he was nine, and to Columbus—probably the scene of the opening chapters of "The Shadow of a Dream"—when he was fourteen. Each of these Western cities now claims the honor of being immortalized by the Boy, although the Dayton Herald declared, that if Dayton was pictured it was Dayton with a halo of poetry about it; not the commonplace Dayton which the unimaginative citizen of Dayton now beholds. Wherever the Town maybe, and whoever may be the Boy, the tale is one which will appeal to all the boys of all the towns in the land, notwithstanding the curious fact that the Boy does not seem to be called "Tom" — a name to which all the best boys in all the standard boys' books of the present day invariably answer, from Tom Brown of Rugby and Oxford, in England, to Tom Bailey of Rivermouth, in New Hampshire, and to Tom Sawyer of Hannibal, in Missouri. Mr. Howells' Boy, whose name is not mentioned at all, was quite as much of a boy as any of these — a thorough boy, from the top of his bare head to the soles of his bare feet—"a Boy from Boy Town"—and every grown-up boy among his readers will find some one of his own peculiar characteristics, and many of his own particular tastes, embodied in this Boy of Mr. Howells', and will wonder how Mr. Howells found him out.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.