Alger, Horatio (1832–1899), writer.After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College in 1852, Alger completed a ministerial course at Harvard Divinity School in 1860. In 1864 he became minister of a Unitarian church in Brewster, Massachusetts. Dismissed from the Unitarian ministry in 1866 on charges of pederasty, he moved to
New York City to earn his living as a writer.
Ragged Dick: or, Street Life in New York, his most popular juvenile story, appeared in book form the following year. In this novel, Alger first used the basic elements of his standard formula: a young hero who rises from rags to middle‐class respectability, and adult patrons who aid his rise, often rewarding the hero with a job, a new suit, or a watch. Employed as a tutor in the homes of several prominent New York families, including the Seligmans and Cardozos, while establishing his literary career, he toured Europe in 1873. Alger traveled to the West to gather local color for his juveniles in 1877, 1878, and 1890. In all, Alger wrote 103 books for juvenile readers including biographies of Daniel
Webster, James
Garfield, and Abraham
Lincoln, before his retirement in 1896.
A reform‐minded Republican, Alger often criticized unfair or corrupt business practices, including stock‐market manipulation and exploitive wages. He avoided factory settings; his heroes were newsboys, bootblacks, and clerks. Despite his modern reputation as an apologist for
capitalism, he was essentially a didactic moralist whose appeal was fundamentally nostalgic and whose melodramas affirmed the virtues of honesty, frugality, education, and filial piety.
See also
Gilded Age;
Literature: Civil War to World War I;
Literature, Popular.
Bibliography
Gary Scharnhorst with and Jack Bales , The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr., 1985.
Carol Nackenoff , The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse, 1994.
Gary Scharnhorst
