Horatio Alger, you look good to me. Stuns you, does it? You yourself conceded that the “higher walks of literature,” as you put it, weren’t your domain. But, like you, I believe that literature, high or low, can teach us a lesson. In your bouncy little books for boys you urged the merits of honesty, hard work, and cheerfulness in adversity. Nowadays we could use much more honesty and hard work. And the only cheerfulness in adversity comes from the White House; it isn’t very catching. You emblematized those qualities in your young heroes, who were all poor on the first page but prospering on the last one. Not that you turned them into top-hatted millionaires, as the Alger myth has it. Your slogan wasn’t rags to riches but, more sensibly, rags to respectability. And that was the kind of progress your readers had a chance to make.
My guess is that you were a good influence on the Gilded Age; it needed a touch of old-fashioned principle. You furnished it and displayed its benefits. From 1867 to 1899 you wrote a hundred novels whose aim was to teach young boys how to succeed by being good. Almost at once you found the right formula for your fiction and never had to alter it. You acknowledged toward the end of a long career that your novels all had a “family resemblance” but then added, with the comfortable assurance of an author who’d sold thousands and thousands of copies, that “this does not seem an objection to readers.”
Of course this sameness irked the critics. One of them snapped in the Literary World, perhaps on reviewing your ninetieth novel, that the only thing new was the names of the characters. However, I’d argue that the critics demanded something you never pretended to provide. They wanted gourmet fare while you were running a fast-food restaurant, and you knew more about a boy’s appetite than they did. You also knew more about the kind of book adults would buy for boys. At the same time that you were telling a tale to enthrall the boys, you were preaching a Protestant ethic endorsed by their parents.
Then, too, your fiction had its share of craftsmanship. Everyone agrees that your plots and characters were built alike, but it isn’t everyone who notices how carefully you kept within your boundaries. Take the matter of tone. Yours was always optimistic and positive but seldom egregiously so. Or the matter of violence. It rarely appeared in your books; though the heroes were sturdy youngsters, they preferred to fend off a bully instead of knocking him flat. Or the matter of dramatic incident. Even while the wicked squire stormed, your readers realized that something would happen to keep him from foreclosing the widow’s mortgage. You used suspense but never of the nail-biting sort — nobody wrestled at the edge of the abyss. The cosmos you created had to be narrow because it was basically benign.
You filled your plots with the problems attached to moving upward but never let them become insoluble. You called, loudly and frequently, on coincidence to help you. Coincidence took the shape of good luck for good people and bad luck for bad. Friend Horatio, I must say that nothing incensed your critics as much as your leaning on luck. You made their necks grow red and their mustaches bristle. It’s true that your heroes were all too apt to rescue a rich man’s child from drowning in the Hudson or from a careening carriage on Broadway, and so assure themselves of a lifetime of good wages and white collars. Correspondingly, bad luck dogged the footsteps of your villains, major or minor. Chance helped to foil the plotting lawyer.
Still, I’d like to plead mitigating circumstances on your behalf. I feel that this is actually another illustration of the fact that there’s more to your fiction than we see at first. I think you struck a chord in the American character: our readiness to believe that good fortune awaits us. This belief explained the success of lotteries, among other things, when you were little, and explains it to-day. Another mitigating circumstance is that you never let success come through luck alone. It had to be a combination: as you phrased it in the title of one of your series of books, it had to be “Luck and Pluck.” You made one of the first of many kindly rich men remark, after reflecting, “I generally find that luck comes oftenest to those who deserve it.”
You created characters who are more convincing than your plots. You always prided yourself on providing us with a “real boy,” active and enterprising, as the hero. You often gave him an endearing sense of humor that he could display even while standing on the bottom rung of the ladder. For his supporting cast you concocted three other characters, so that you had two pairs of foils. Against the hero you set a malicious young snob. Against the hero’s worldly but warmhearted patron, often the father of the rescued child, you set a middle-aged rascal who schemed to do the hero in. You frequently added two minor characters: the hero’s devoted and usually widowed mother and a rich, mysterious stranger who helped to thwart the rascal. You chose your remaining characters from a gallery of city and country types that you’d observed. Most were male. Though you were no American Dickens, you could paint a businessman, a bootblack, or a bartender in just a few broad strokes. Your female characters, I’m afraid, were all too often cut from cardboard.
I think you were shrewd — or lucky like your lads — in your choice of settings for your early and especially important fiction. Your favorite was Manhattan and not simply because you settled there. Despite the deductions for dirt and crime, New York was already our most exciting city. When you wrote your breakthrough book, Ragged Dick, you set the action in downtown and midtown Manhattan. A third of the way into the story you took your readers on a tour with your loquacious hero that must have widened their eyes; you made crossing Broadway against the clattering traffic an adventure.
You liked dialogue and learned to make yours brisk, particularly in the confrontation scenes, which you obviously relished. When good disputed with evil, good always won; the hero’s patron always faced down the hero’s enemy, leaving him muttering and discomfited. Also you made your dialogue the vehicle for your humor. A typical exchange would be between an Irish kitchen maid, speaking in the broadest of brogues, and the testy squire she worked for. Though no one ever accused you of being a wit, your efforts lightened your pages.
It wasn’t in the dialogue alone that good triumphed in your abbreviated universe. In the end it won in deed as well as word, though evil had to win the preliminary skirmishes or there wouldn’t have been a book. Beneath all your busyness — manipulating your characters, making things happen, shifting your scenery — you kept your ultimate purpose in mind. You were not merely telling a tale, you were giving golden instructions.
Out of the Protestant ethic you picked two related elements to emphasize. One was that, for young or old, honesty was the best policy; the other was that, besides being advantageous, honesty was right. The honesty you illustrated throughout your books was, both literally and figuratively, fiscal. After Ragged Dick repaid a customer the fifteen cents due him, the customer gave Ragged Dick a job. Not at once, naturally; you had to complicate the plot first. But by the end of the novel Ragged Dick was on his way to being Richard Hunter, Esquire.
You wrote as if your young audience sat spellbound before you, eager to be instructed. And you didn’t hesitate to instruct. You wanted to inspire honesty above all in your boys, but you realized that there were other aids to respectability, temperance in particular. A dedicated foe of drinking and smoking, you could conjure up a lurid picture of the wreck that alcohol made of a man and then add, “Think of this picture, boy-reader, and resolve thus early that such a description shall never apply to you.” And you seldom missed a chance to stigmatize tobacco as the “noxious weed.”
Thanks to the hundred novels you ended up as an American legend. To-day we have not only a flourishing Horatio Alger myth — which doesn’t quite fit reality — but also a Horatio Alger Society, an annual Horatio Alger Award, and even a Horatio Alger postage stamp. Yet one thing is certain: you never dreamed of becoming legendary.
Born on January 13, 1832, into a threadbare ministerial family — his father usually had to struggle to make ends meet — Horatio Alger spent his boyhood in the pleasant town of Marlborough, Massachusetts. His fiction would later mirror both the hard times his family knew and the pastoral atmosphere of Marlborough. Like a good many bright boys, he went to his local academy to prepare for college. He entered Harvard in the autumn of 1848, and the next four years were, he said once, the most enjoyable in his life.
After college he embarked on a career as a writer, not of boys’ books but of literature for adults. However, he had to earn a living and, no matter how fast he pushed his pen, he stayed on the edge of genteel poverty. He turned to the ministry because it promised a decent income, but the ministry proved to be a disaster. It was only after that, when he was thirty-five, that he migrated to New York and quickly established himself as the nation’s most notable author of juvenile fiction. Appropriately, good luck helped; but the important thing was that, once on top, he had the talent to stay there for three rewarding decades.
His shift to New York in 1866 was the pivotal point in his career. Just before that he’d served as minister of a little Unitarian church in Brewster, on Cape Cod. When he was chosen by the congregation late in 1864, the members must have had mixed emotions. He was short, barely over five feet, and slight, with a boyish look to him; in fact, he was the smallest man in his Harvard class. His manner was effusive and he stammered slightly in conversation, though he spoke easily enough in the pulpit. Anyone who yearned for a pulpit thunderer was going to be disappointed.
True enough, his college record had been one of the best in the class of ’52. However, during the dozen years after graduation, he showed no evidence of the “call” that some church members considered indispensable for a minister. He plainly preferred writing to preaching, for he’d been writing since boyhood and he’d begun to publish as early as his sophomore year. It turned out that he housed a dynamo in his small frame. As the 1850s went along, he produced a prodigious amount of mildly sentimental, mildly didactic fiction for adults, fiction that was the 1850s equivalent of to-day’s television serials. All this was for the popular magazines and newspapers, but he also published a respectfully received book. Its very title illuminates the gap between his time and ours. No reader to-day, however refined, could be lured into buying a volume entitled Bertha’s Christmas Vision: An Autumn Sheaf. Yet the Monthly Religious Magazine for January 1856 recommended the book as a “collection of stories and verses, written in an uncommonly pure spirit.”
Though purity of spirit was calculated to impress a congregation, the fact remained that Alger’s interest in preparing for the ministry had been limited. As a graduate student in Harvard’s Divinity School he performed only passably. His attendance was irregular and he didn’t finish until July 1860. Meanwhile, he’d been winning his way into some of the better magazines such as Harper’s and Putnam’s and even, once, the prestigious North American Review. But he was still poorly paid. Writing to another author in later years, he reported wryly, “For an article in the North American Review on which I expended considerable labor I was paid at the rate of a dollar per printed page.”
When the Civil War broke out he was rejected for military service as asthmatic; so, since he was a vigorous Unionist, he contributed his talent for writing to the Union cause. He produced much patriotic prose and verse, but the most significant result was his first boys’ book. He called it Frank’s Campaign and published it in 1864 with the Boston firm A. K. Loring. Though he’d composed nothing resembling it before, it proved to contain almost every element that he was to use during the rest of his career. The story centered on a hardy lad who volunteered to work the family farm so that his father could volunteer for the Union army. Alger made the mainspring of the plot the victory of good over evil, and he advised his young readers to apply the book’s lessons to their lives. The cast of characters, from the hero to the mysterious but helpful stranger, made the first of a hundred appearances. The magazine Student and Schoolmate endorsed Frank’s Campaign as a capital book for boys.
At intervals he put down his pen and looked around for a congregation. In Brewster he discovered one willing to pay $800 a year and still allow him almost as much freedom to write as he craved. When, after some debate, the congregation formally installed him, it was entitled to more misgivings than it realized. For it was installing a closet homosexual.
During his first year, most things went swimmingly. The better magazines accepted more of his writing and his second boys’ book, Paul Prescott’s Charge, came out. “Likely to prove a favorite,” the Nation predicted. He performed his ministerial duties and even found time for joining organizations. But he also found time for his homosexuality.
Edwin Hoyt, in his Horatio’s Boys: The Life and Works of Horatio Alger, Jr., provides the fullest account of the affair, based on parish records. They show that by the start of Alger’s second year rumors were circulating about his habits. In March 1866 the congregation set up an investigating committee. The evidence it found was shocking. The congregation hailed Alger before it, confronted him with the evidence, and then expelled him from his post. In a letter to the American Unitarian Association in Boston, the congregation charged that he’d been guilty of the “abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys.” In outrage it underlined the word “boys.” When confronted he’d merely admitted to being “imprudent,” so the congregation added that he’d responded to the charge “with the apparent calmness of an old offender.”
Perhaps so. But I believe it’s much more likely that beneath his surface calmness lay profound shame and humiliation. In the eyes of nineteenth-century America he’d been guilty of an abomination. I believe that he soon felt deeply that his conduct cried for repentance and penance. One important index of this is a poem he composed shortly after his expulsion. I believe that, writer that he was, he coped with his emotions in part at least by putting them on paper. Composing the poem was an attempt at catharsis. It may well have worked, for he even submitted the poem for publication to a New York monthly, the Galaxy. He titled it “Friar Anselmo’s Sin.”
The opening couplet reads: “Friar Anselmo (God’s grace may he win!) / Committed one sad day a deadly sin.” It closes: “And many a soul, oppressed with pain and grief,/ Owed to the friar solace and relief.” Early in the poem the friar yearns for death in order to expiate his unspecified sin. However, by chance a wounded traveler crawls to his door and Anselmo tends him. Thereafter an angel appears to Anselmo to assure him that he can erase his sin by serving others: “Thy guilty stains shall be washed white again,/ By noble service done thy fellow-men.”
I believe that Alger meant what he implied in the poem, that he considered suicide but determined to live a life of penance. He reacted to the trauma of Brewster by sublimating his homosexuality into a permanent concern for the welfare not of his fellow men but of boys, particularly poor ones. I believe that he courted temptation and overcame it; I don’t think that Brewster simply taught him to be more circumspect. There’s no record of any overt sexual activity later on, and after the success of Ragged Dick he was enough of a public figure to make any deviation apt to be observed.
I think his conversion was so effective that in a few years he could look back on his earlier actions almost as if they were those of someone else. There’s an interesting sign of this in a letter that Henry James, Sr., sent to his author son. He wrote in spring of 1870, “Alger talks freely about his own late insanity — which he in fact appears to enjoy as a subject of conversation.” He added that Alger had interested William James in it, and we know that William had been doing some research on insanity. We can get an idea of how well Alger distanced himself by a comment he made in print two decades later. He noted, in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, that he had a “natural liking for boys.” It’s true that he may have written this with a wicked grin, but I doubt it. Even the hard-bitten publisher Frank Munsey eulogized him, after his death, for his purity of soul.
At any rate, he proceeded to do a double penance, through his writing and through personal philanthropy. He announced that he’d “leased [his] pen to the boys,” and boys became both his permanent subject and the bulk of his public.
It was less than a month after Brewster that he surfaced in New York. He rented a dingy room and then gravitated toward the “street arabs” of Manhattan. There were thousands of them, runaways or orphans for the most part. Many had to live in the Five Points area, Manhattan’s notorious slum. As early as summer 1866 he attended a children’s church service at the Five Points mission. The first street arab he befriended was one Johnny Nolan, who worked as a bootblack and called every day at the office of an acquaintance of Alger’s. Johnny’s stories of street life excited Alger’s interest and led him, as he wrote later, “to undertake the story of ‘Ragged Dick,’ in which Johnny figures.”
Because the real-life Johnny was shiftless and no model for the hero Alger wanted, he levied on Johnny’s peers and devised a rough diamond whom he christened Dick. Alger gave him, beneath his rags, decent instincts and innate honesty. Alger knew that boys in general wouldn’t relish reading about a prig, so he made him wise in the ways of the street and allowed him a cocky sense of humor. He built a short serial out of Dick’s experiences in Manhattan, using the techniques and structures he’d first employed in Frank’s Campaign. He sold the serial to Student and Schoolmate and with each installment the enthusiasm of young readers grew. After expanding the serial he mailed the manuscript to his publisher, Mr. Loring.
The book was an instant hit. Nobody had written anything like it before. Boys, and no doubt numbers of girls, besieged their parents to buy it for them. Parents responded readily to the moral teachings so colorfully dressed. Student and Schoolmate overflowed with pride at Ragged Dick’s reception, prophesying that it would propel Alger into first place among authors of juvenile fiction. Its success persuaded even so solidly established a magazine for adults as Putnam’s to term it very readable. And Putnam’s was right. He’d given readers a lively, likable hero; a stage setting before which nothing stood still; and, quite probably, an inspiration to work hard and do well.
According to several accounts, the acclaim for Ragged Dick led to Alger’s becoming acquainted with the New York philanthropist Charles L. Brace, whose chief concern was homeless boys. Brace had started the Children’s Aid Society, which in turn had started the Newsboys’ Lodging House. He introduced Alger to the Lodging House, and Alger found it the ideal headquarters. For several years he received a bed there to sleep in if he wished and even a desk where he could jot down his observations while they were fresh. He sallied out from the Lodging House in various directions, usually into Manhattan’s meanest streets and onto the waterfront. The Golden Argosy recalled, in an issue in 1885, that he soon “became a familiar figure along the docks, and wherever the friendless urchins could be found.”
He encountered an ample supply of boys to write about and to assist. I consider it a tribute to Alger that his assistance obviously wasn’t resented. An elfin little man with big eyes and a soup-strainer mustache, he mingled comfortably with his boys. Grace Edes wrote of him in retrospect, in her Annals of the Harvard Class of 1852, “His genial manner, ready sympathy, and generous aid made him beloved” among the street arabs.
He did his double penance with such devotion that I can’t escape thinking that it soon stopped being penance. During most of his career he enjoyed writing even though he occasionally complained about it. Similarly, he enjoyed helping boys even though at least once he had to move from bigger to smaller quarters to cut down on their clamorous company. Otherwise, he loved his chains. His best work, according to the Argosy, was often done when half a dozen boys were “making the liveliest kind of music” in his handsome rooms on West 26th Street.
In fact, he grew to believe that he had a genuine call to his kind of authorship. He never had a call to the ministry, and he once assured a correspondent that he’d studied theology mainly for its relation to literature. Authorship was something else, though. In a piece headed “Writing Stories for Boys” that he contributed to the Writer magazine of March 1896, he said firmly that “no writer should undertake to write for boys who does not feel that he has been called to that particular work.”
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No later novel aroused the excitement that Ragged Dick did, but Alger never quite lost the prestige it gave him. He went ahead, turning out page after foolscap page. Delighted by the sales of Ragged Dick, Loring contracted for the publication of five more novels in what became the Ragged Dick Series. Then came the Tattered Tom Series, followed by the Luck and Pluck Series, the Brave and Bold Series, and several more. The very titles of the books often told the tale and attested, incidentally, to the similarity of his stories. For instance, he produced Mark the Match Boy, Ben the Luggage Boy, and Dan the Newsboy; along with The Young Bank Messenger, The Young Salesman, and The Young Miner. He systematically altered the occupations while keeping the basic structure.
He shifted his settings less easily than his occupations, but shift them he did. However, he was happiest with Manhattan and, after that, a Massachusetts village much like the one he grew up in. In some novels he alternated between the city and the country. Gradually and a little reluctantly, he went further afield and in time ventured as far away as California. He exemplified his outreach in one of the novels of the mid-1870s, Julius or The Street Boy Out West. And later, after a trip to California, he tendered the public a whole Pacific Series.
Yet he did more than try to ring changes on Ragged Dick. For a time he improved as a writer. He widened his efforts at characterization and sharpened his dialogue. He developed the ability to manufacture suspense and improved at least slightly in integrating his lessons into the action. By the end of the 1870s his creativity waned, for even Alger’s effervescent energy had its limits. Nevertheless, he worked along efficiently for at least another ten years, seasoned professional that he was. As late as 1890 he published a book that proved quite acceptable to his readers despite the cavils of the critics, Struggling Upward or Luke Larkin’s Luck.
There he displayed his time-tested formula from the title page to the conclusion. Struggling Upward is the story of an honest, vigorous boy who lives in the village of Groveton. He is accused, falsely of course, of theft, but wins the confidence of two potential benefactors. After assorted adventures Including a trip out west to the Black Hills, he sees his enemies confounded by his benefactors, his widowed mother relieved of want, and himself on the path to a promising position in New York.
In Struggling Upward Alger’s cast of characters, like his plot, contains no surprises. Luke’s foil, named Randolph Duncan, is a bully and a snob, much given to curling his lip. His father, Squire Duncan, shows an arrogance befitting his first name, which is Prince, and a greed that pushes him into crime. One of Luke’s benefactors, Roland Reed, also plays the mysterious stranger. He appears at Luke’s trial and dramatically establishes Luke’s innocence. The other benefactor, John Armstrong, is an elderly businessman whose bonds Squire Duncan has stolen and whose office will later employ Luke.
Some of the dialogue assigned to his characters shows that Alger was tiring, for instance, when he has Luke say to a girl who’s just invited him to a party: “Thank you, Florence.… You are very kind, and I shall have great pleasure in being present. Shall you have many?” But ordinarily his dialogue is much more animated, for example, in a tense cat-and-mouse conversation between the squire and the village saloonkeeper who has come to blackmail him.
Alger also left other hallmarks on Struggling Upwrd. He leaned so heavily on coincidence that it threatened to break under its own weight. For example, when Mr. Armstrong sends Luke out West to search for his former bookkeeper, Alger has the bookkeeper stay in the same hotel in Chicago where Luke will later stay. More than that, he has the hotel clerk find and show to Luke a diary which the bookkeeper has left behind. Astonishingly, it contains a clue to the bookkeeper’s whereabouts. Even Alger admitted that this “was a little singular.” When it comes to characterization, the squire is wicked as we’d expect him to be. When it comes to plot, it’s the squire of course who threatens to foreclose the mortgage on Mrs. Larkin’s cottage.
Also typically, Alger intervenes in the story, both in commenting on the action and in pointing a moral. When Luke accepts a tin box from the stranger, Alger breaks in to speculate about the event, “Was it for good or ill?” And he preaches with undiminished insistence. He has Mr. Reed assure Luke, “Do your duty, Luke, and your good fortune will continue.” When Alger doesn’t speak through his characters, he speaks directly as the author; for instance, “Debt is much more easily contracted than liquidated.” He reemphasizes the merits of honesty, hard work, and cheerfulness in adversity. He has Mr. Armstrong announce that he’d begun as a poor boy, barefoot and in overalls; far from harming him, poverty has made him “industrious and self-reliant” and anxious to please his employer.
The rewards and punishments Alger parcels out in the final pages are all as should be. Squire Duncan flees Groveton in disgrace; Randolph has to go to work as an office boy at little more than 50 cents a day. Mr. Reed, who turns out to be a cousin of Luke’s late father, gives Luke a nest egg of $10,000; Mr. Armstrong gives him a position “at a liberal salary.” Mr. Reed also builds a new and better house for Luke’s mother. What more could we ask?
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Looking back we can see that Alger was an American accident and prospered for decades through the happiest of chances. He filled a void in our country’s culture. When he began in the late 1860s, he had scant competition, direct or indirect. A handful of other authors were writing boys’ books, chief among them the editor of Student and Schoolmate, but he generously granted Alger superiority. Throughout the years he overmatched all others by what he wrote, by how much he wrote, and by how long he wrote. Even in his final decade he hadn’t lost all momentum: Struggling Upward was a token of this fact.
His indirect competition came from genres other than juvenile fiction. Being indirect they never threatened either his sales or his standing very much. The domestic novel, for one, appealed to adults with a liking for sentimentality. It often included children among its characters; but when they had a leading role they were invariably little girls who responded to mistreatment with tears or, occasionally, tantrums. Little boys were merely noisy and well fed. I can’t recall an American domestic novel with a little boy as its hero, but I know of a dozen centering around a little girl. Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, about little Ellen’s travails, is a classic of that genre. Its attraction for boy readers must have been zero.
I don’t think that the manual of conduct for males cut into Alger’s readership either. It was an era of manuals but most were addressed to young men rather than to boys. And anyway, they were too preachy to be appreciated by a young audience. While their sober and steady moralizing commended the manuals to parents, most boys must have read them with eyes glazed. It’s true that a few alert authors, led by T. S. Arthur and W. A. Alcott, enlivened their manuals with made-up anecdotes, but their appeal didn’t come close to Alger’s.
The inspirational biography offered some, though not much, competition. The poet Longfellow spoke for his era in “The Psalm of Life” when he announced, to the beat of the metronome, “Lives of great men all remind us / We can make our lives sublime.” The all too popular prototype was the work of the incredible Mason Locke Weems. The full title of one of the early nineteenth-century versions of “Parson” Weems’s book makes the point: The Life of George Washington; with Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honorable to Himself and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen. The book remained popular throughout the century, and its success encouraged the production of a good many imitations. Understandably, though, they were about presidents or generals rather than about commercial or industrial leaders. An Andrew Jackson had far more appeal than a John Jacob Astor but didn’t provide much guidance for Alger’s boys.
At the other extreme from the conduct manual and, inevitably, much more inviting, stood the dime novel. It developed during the latter part of Alger’s career. Its plots were action-packed; its heroes were burly outdoor types with scant interest in upward mobility; and it favored frontier settings, the West above all. Its authors aimed as a rule at the adult market. However, knowing as well as the next man that the dime novel appealed to many boys, they aimed an occasional one straight at them. Alger recognized a threat when he saw one, so he fought back. “Such stories,” he warned in “Writing Stories for Boys,” “as ‘The Boy Highwayman,’ ‘The Boy Pirate,’ and books of that class, do incalculable mischief.” Apparently large numbers of ministers, parents, and librarians felt the same way; anyhow, his books kept on selling, with never a “Young Gunslinger” among them.
If his efficiency was awesome, his modesty about his talent was admirable. To another author, E. C. Stedman, he admitted that when he devoted himself to juvenile fiction, the adult world was spared much poor poetry and high-flown prose. And when Alger published his March 1896 piece in the Writer, he showed a proper sense of proportion. He promised his fellow professionals that he wouldn’t weary them “with a detailed account of [his] books and the circumstances under which they were written.”
When he died three years later, the obituaries were more or less dismissive. On the other hand, by a turn of events so remarkable that even Alger wouldn’t have dared to use it in his books, the early twentieth century took up those books and transformed them into a vogue. During the euphoric years before World War I, the Alger myth was perfected and his fiction sold better — by hundreds of thousands of copies — than it ever had while he was alive.
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Right now I have a dog-eared, incomplete copy of Ragged Dick lying on my desk. It’s one of those early twentieth-century reprints, and its condition reminds me that I’ve seldom noticed a copy of any of his novels that hasn’t been read to tatters. Though no one can measure how much their young readers benefited, I like to think that the benefit was substantial. So I end as I began: Horatio Alger, you look good to me.
— C. B.