Alger, Horatio 1832-1899

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Horatio Alger Jr. is the author most closely associated with the American rags-to-riches story. His name has become synonymous with the experience of rising from relative poverty to substantial fortune without an inheritance; such a trajectory is often termed a “real Horatio Alger story.” The son of a Unitarian minister living in Revere and Marlborough, Massachusetts, Alger graduated from Harvard University in 1852 and from the Harvard Divinity School in 1860. The Harvard Unitarians were heirs to the Calvinists, the Puritans, and the Congregationalist tradition. The Unitarians were steeped in a belief in the importance of character and the role of both the individual and the community in maintaining the character and ethical sensibility in the young. At Harvard, Alger studied Greek and Latin and read Scottish common-sense philosophers such as Francis Bacon and Thomas Reid. The Harvard Unitarian moralists of the antebellum era sought to render Plato’s teachings compatible with Christianity, and as Alger saw it, Socrates believed in divine retribution for earthly sinners. Alger also studied with the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) and later sought his favor when he published his own volume of adult poetry in 1875. One of Alger’s mentors was Harvard president Edward Everett (1794-1865).

Alger served briefly as a minister in Brewster, Massachusetts, but left the ministry in 1866 and moved to New York City to earn his living by his pen. An author of modest literary talent, Alger wrote fiction aimed at pleasing large audiences, but amassed no riches in doing so. In addition to writing, Alger also tutored the sons of wealthy New Yorkers, including those of the Seligman and Cardozo families. Alger published 123 works as novels, serializations in newspapers and magazines, and books of poetry. Most of his formulaic fiction was aimed at juvenile readers. Alger created nineteenth-century characters who are “risen from the ranks,” who “strive and succeed” and are “bound to rise”; they manage to transform themselves with “luck and pluck” and with the help of benevolent mentors from bootblacks, newsboys, or street peddlers to respectable adults with comfortable middle-class incomes. Some late heroes attain more remarkable fortunes, particularly in the era of the robber barons. Several novels feature heroines, such as Jenny Lindsay, the title character in Tattered Tom, who is saved from street life before she attains adolescence. Quite a few heroes leave New England farms and villages where their families cannot support them and go to the big city, but some heroes depart for Western adventures and one is sent, with the help of the Children’s Aid Society, from the city to the countryside to be brought up in a healthier environment.

Alger kept his heroes out of the way of modern factory labor. Genteel moralists of his era believed that manliness required independence; factories were seen as both breeding dependence and bringing the young into contact with fellow workers who endangered virtue. Alger’s most famous and popular work, Ragged Dick, was published in 1867 and featured a young, spirited, cheerful but ragged orphan bootblack who captures the attention of a benefactor who helps him attain middle-class respectability. Alger asserted that his story Phil, the Fiddler, featuring a very young Italian street musician, helped to end the exploitive padrone system, a system that involved the near-enslavement of young children brought from Italy to work for the benefit of those to whom they were contractually bound. The author befriended and assisted various young boys, and informally adopted at least two of them.

Alger heroes not only work hard and help themselves but also possess steadfast character, are loyal to their employers, and help others along the way who are deserving. In Alger’s formula, character is capital. Its value is recognized wherever it goes. Stories arrange for accidents through which the character of the struggling young person comes to the attention of a benefactor. Foils are excessively focused on money, social status, and finery; they consume but do not produce, and have no fellow feeling. Alger’s morality tales frequently arrange justice for such characters. These stories not only provided graphic detail of neighborhoods of New York but also told readers how to avoid crime and confidence games. However, by the 1890s, some moralists inveighed against juvenile fiction, including Alger’s, for planting false ideas of life in the heads of impressionable young people, encouraging them to leave their homes for adventure in the city or out West. Many libraries removed Alger novels in this period.

The fiction of Horatio Alger Jr. fueled the American dream of rising through the ranks and becoming selfmade. Poverty was not an insurmountable barrier to success, and character—a key ingredient of success—was under one’s own control. Many Americans would subsequently conclude that failure was the individual’s own fault. While it was appropriate for charitable organizations and benevolent individuals to help deserving young people along the way, for quite a few Americans the self-help creed precluded public, governmental efforts to address poverty and inequality.

SEE ALSO American Dream; False Consciousness

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cawelti, John. 1965. Apostles of the Self-Made Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Moon, Michael. 1987. “The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes”: Domesticity, Pederasty, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger. Representations 19 (summer): 87-110.

Nackenoff, Carol. 1994. The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.

Scharnhorst, Gary. 1980. Horatio Alger, Jr. Boston: Twayne Publishers.

Scharnhorst, Gary, with Jack Bales. 1985. The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Carol Nackenoff

Horatio Alger

Horatio Alger (1832-1899) was the American author of prodigiously popular and influential juvenile novels and biographies.

Horatio Alger was born in Revere, Mass., the son of a Unitarian minister. The fervent father so rigorously supervised his son's early training that at 9 the boy was known as "Holy Horatio." Soon he was doing superior work at Gates Academy and, later, at Harvard, from which he graduated at 19. After a few years as a tutor and journalist, he acceded to his father's wishes and enrolled in the Harvard Divinity School; he received his diploma in 1860. But instead of entering the ministry, thanks to an unexpected inheritance he was enabled to go abroad, and free from parental supervision he enjoyed 7 months of bohemian travel. Returning home, he served as a Unitarian minister until 1866, when he moved to New York to make it his home until his very last years.

Having already published four moderately successful books for children, Alger decided to continue writing. With Ragged Dick, or Street Life in New York (1868) he scored his first formidable success. Attracted by the book, Charles O'Connor, a social worker, invited Alger to visit the Newsboys' Lodging House. The author served actively in the operation of this home for foundlings and runaways for 30 years. Much of the material for his subsequent books came from interviews with its young male residents: Fame and Fortune (1868), Mark the Match Boy (1869), Rough and Ready (1869), Sink or Swim (1870), Ben the Luggage Boy (1870), Paul the Peddler (1871), Bound to Rise (1872). After a trip to the Far West made at the urging of his publisher, Alger wrote The Young Miner (1879), The Young Explorer (1880), Ben's Nugget (1882), and Joe's Luck (1887). His instructive biographies about self-made political leaders sold widely: From Canal Boy to President (1881), concerning James A. Garfield; From Farm Boy to Senator (1882), about Daniel Webster; and Lincoln, the Backwoods Boy (1883). Altogether Alger wrote 109 books averaging 50,000 words each, plus some 100,000 words of shorter material, thus producing about 150,000 words a year during his literary career.

The typical Alger hero was a boy who, born poor, overcame odds by living virtuously and working hard and rose to fame and fortune. The preachment in the books that honesty, perseverance, and industry were certain to be rewarded was taken seriously and followed faithfully by many boys in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who read some of the estimated 20,000,000 copies sold in the United States alone. The author himself lived according to his favorite formula: he rose from poverty to the affluence possible on annual earnings of $20,000 during a period when money had at least three times its present value. Ironically, and unhappily for his credibility, Alger's own life story ended in poverty in his sister's home in Natick, Mass., where he died in 1899.

Further Reading

Frank Gruber, himself a prolific author of popular fiction, is chiefly interested in Alger's bibliography in Horatio Alger, Jr.: A Biography and a Bibliography (1961). More valuable for information about the author's life, his influence, and the quality of his writings are John W. Tebbel, From Rags toRiches (1963), and Ralph D. Gardner, Horatio Alger, or the American Hero Era (1964).

Additional Sources

Gardner, Ralph D., Horatio Alger: or, The American hero era, New York: Arco Pub. Co., 1978, 1971.

Hoyt, Edwin Palmer, Horatio's boys: the life and works of Horatio Alger, Jr., New York: Stein and Day, 1983, 1974.

Scharnhorst, Gary, Horatio Alger, Jr., Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

Scharnhorst, Gary, The lost life of Horatio Alger, Jr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. □

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

Horatio Alger , 1834–99, American writer of boys' stories, b. Revere, Mass. He wrote over 100 books for boys, the first, Ragged Dick, being published in 1867. By leading exemplary lives, struggling valiantly against poverty and adversity, Alger's heroes gain wealth and honor. His works were all extremely popular. Silas Snobden's Office Boy, which ran serially in the Argosy magazine in 1889–90, was not published as a book until 1973.

Bibliography: See H. R. Mayes, Alger (1928, repr. 1978); study by E. P. Hoyt (1983); bibliography by G. Scharnhorst and J. Bales (1981).

Alger, Horatio (1832–99) US author and minister who wrote more than 135 books for young boys on the theme of self-help. The Horatio Alger hero became one who, through hard work, rose from rags to riches. His works include Fame and Fortune, Struggling Upward and Strive and Succeed.