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From Bad Boy To Good Ol' Boy: Literary Origins Of The South's Notorious Figure, Jennifer Burkett Pittman

Articles

Mark Twain is credited with creating the term "bad boy" in boys' literature from 1865 (Murray 75). His Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) subsequently ignited the "bad boy boom" (Kidd 75). Though Tom Sawyer was not a best-seller until the twentieth century, the novel has come to represent the quintessential boys' book of the American nineteenth century (Parille 2-6). Although it has been 135 years since Tom Sawyer was published, I argue that the concept of the bad boy continues in contemporary literature, specifically Willie Morris' Good Old Boy (1971), although the bad boy has morphed into the concept of …