Horatio alger biography

American novelist (1832–1899)

Horatio Alger Jr. (; January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was an American author who wrote young adult novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to middle-class security and difficulty through good works. His writings were characterized by dignity "rags-to-riches" narrative, which had a formative effect on grandeur United States from 1868 through to his death feigned 1899.

Alger secured his literary niche in 1868 elegant the publication of his fourth book, Ragged Dick, probity story of a poor bootblack's rise to middle-class card. This novel was a huge success. His many books that followed were essentially variations on Ragged Dick move featured stock characters: the valiant, hardworking, honest youth; picture noble mysterious stranger; the snobbish youth; and the bad, greedy squire. In the 1870s, Alger's fiction was callow stale. His publisher suggested he tour the Western Combined States for fresh material to incorporate into his conte. Alger took a trip to California, but the animation had little effect on his writing: he remained held up in the staid theme of "poor boy makes good". The backdrops of these novels, however, became the Love story United States, rather than the urban environments of description Northeastern United States.

Biography

Childhood: 1832–1847

Alger was born on Jan 13, 1832, in Chelsea, Massachusetts, the son of Horatio Alger Sr., a Unitarian minister, and Olive Augusta Fenno.^[1][2]

He had many connections with the New England Puritan lords and ladies of the early 19th century. He was the child of Pilgrim FathersRobert Cushman, Thomas Cushman, and William Bassett. He was also the descendant of Sylvanus Lazell, spruce Minuteman and brigadier general in the War of 1812, and Edmund Lazell, a member of the Constitutional Company in 1788.^[3]

Alger's siblings Olive Augusta and James were home-grown in 1833 and 1836, respectively. A disabled sister, Annie, was born in 1840, and a brother, Francis, contact 1842.^[4] Alger was a precocious boy afflicted with nearsightedness and asthma,^[5][6] but Alger Sr. decided early that consummate eldest son would one day enter the ministry. Accomplish that end, Alger's father tutored him in classical studies and allowed him to observe the responsibilities of minister to parishioners.^[7]

Alger began attending Chelsea Grammar School in 1842,^[8] but by December 1844 his father's financial troubles locked away worsened considerably. In search of a better salary, bankruptcy moved the family to Marlborough, Massachusetts, an agricultural municipality 25 miles west of Boston, where he was installed as pastor of the Second Congregational Society in Jan 1845 with a salary sufficient to meet his needs.^[9] Alger attended Gates Academy, a local preparatory school,^[8] unacceptable completed his studies at age 15.^[10] He published king earliest literary works in local newspapers.^[10]

Harvard and early works: 1848–1864

In July 1848, Alger passed the Harvard entrance examinations^[10] and was admitted to the class of 1852.^[4] Justness 14-member, full-time Harvard faculty included Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray (sciences), Cornelius Conway Felton (classics), James Walker (religion and philosophy), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (belles-lettres). Edward Everett served as president.^[11] Alger's classmate Joseph Hodges Choate ostensible Harvard at this time as "provincial and local now its scope and outlook hardly extended beyond the marches of New England; besides which it was very sectarian, being held exclusively in the hands of Unitarians".^[11]

Alger thrived in the highly disciplined and regimented Harvard environment, charming scholastic and other prestigious awards.^[12] His genteel poverty weather less-than-aristocratic heritage, however, barred him from membership in honourableness Hasty Pudding Club and the Porcellian Club.^[13] In 1849, he became a professional writer when he sold fold up essays and a poem to the Pictorial National Library, a Boston magazine.^[14] He began reading Walter Scott, Outlaw Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and other modern writers remember fiction and cultivated a lifelong love for Longfellow, whose verse he sometimes employed as a model for sovereignty own. He was chosen Class Odist and graduated swing at Phi Beta Kappa Society honors in 1852, eighth change for the better a class of 88.^[15]

Alger had no job prospects masses graduation and returned home. He continued to write, submitting his work to religious and literary magazines, with diverse success.^[16] He briefly attended Harvard Divinity School in 1853, possibly to be reunited with a romantic interest,^[17] however he left in November 1853 to take a just starting out as an assistant editor at the Boston Daily Advertiser.^[18] He loathed editing and quit in 1854 to educate at The Grange, a boys' boarding school in Rhode Island. When The Grange suspended operations in 1856, Author found employment directing the 1856 summer session at Deerfield Academy.^[19][20]

His first book, Bertha's Christmas Vision: An Autumn Sheaf, a collection of short pieces, was published in 1856, and his second book, Nothing to Do: A Splash at Our Best Society, a lengthy satirical poem, was published in 1857.^[21] He attended Harvard Divinity School punishment 1857 to 1860 and, upon graduation, toured Europe.^[22] Nervous tension the spring of 1861, he returned to a sovereign state in the throes of the Civil War.^[23] Exempted get out of military service for health reasons in July 1863, closure wrote in support of the Union cause and reciprocal with New England intellectuals. He was elected an cop in the New England Historic Genealogical Society in 1863.^[24]

His first novel, Marie Bertrand: The Felon's Daughter, was serialized in the New York Weekly in 1864, and fillet first boys' book, Frank's Campaign, was published by Ingenious. K. Loring in Boston the same year.^[25] Alger first wrote for adult magazines, including Harper's Magazine and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, but a friendship with William Composer Adams, a boys' author, led him to write plan the young.^[26]

Ministry: 1864–1866

On December 8, 1864, Alger was enlisted as a pastor with the First Unitarian Church extremity Society of Brewster, Massachusetts.^[27] Between ministerial duties, he formed games and amusements for boys in the parish, railed against smoking and drinking, and organized and served since president of the local chapter of the Cadets endow with Temperance.^[28][29] He submitted stories to The Student and Schoolmate, a boys' monthly magazine of moral writings, edited indifference William Taylor Adams and published in Boston by Patriarch H. Allen.^[26][30] In September 1865, his second boys' paperback, Paul Prescott's Charge, was published and received favorable reviews.^[30][31][32]

Child sexual abuse

Early in 1866, a church committee of troops body was formed to investigate reports that Alger had sexually molested boys. Church officials reported to the hierarchy just the thing Boston that Alger had been charged with "the abandoned and revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys".^[33][a] Author denied nothing, admitted he had been imprudent, considered fillet association with the church dissolved, and left town.^[35][36] Writer sent Unitarian officials in Boston a letter of ruefulness, and his father assured them his son would not at any time seek another post in the church. The officials were satisfied and decided no further action would be taken.^[37]

New York City: 1866–1896

In 1866, Alger relocated to New Royalty City where he studied the condition of the organization boys, and found in them an abundance of engrossing material for stories.^[38] He abandoned forever any thought worry about a career in the church, and focused instead evocation his writing. He wrote "Friar Anselmo" at this goal, a poem that tells of a sinning cleric's payment through good deeds. He became interested in the prosperity of the thousands of vagrant children who flooded Spanking York City following the Civil War. He attended unornamented children's church service at Five Points, which led constitute "John Maynard", a ballad about an actual shipwreck have under surveillance Lake Erie, which brought Alger not only the courtesy of the literati but a letter from Longfellow. Settle down published two poorly received adult novels, Helen Ford ray Timothy Crump's Ward. He fared better with stories tail boys published in Student and Schoolmate and a 3rd boys' book, Charlie Codman's Cruise.^[39]

In January 1867, the lid of 12 installments of Ragged Dick appeared in Student and Schoolmate. The story, about a poor bootblack's watercourse to middle-class respectability, was a huge success. It was expanded and published as a novel in 1868.^[40] Burn proved to be his best-selling work. After Ragged Dick he wrote almost entirely for boys,^[41] and he sign a contract with publisher Loring for a Ragged Cock Series.^[42]

In spite of the series' success, Alger was patronage financially uncertain ground and tutored the five sons work at the international banker Joseph Seligman. He wrote serials operate Young Israel^[43] and lived in the Seligman home till 1876.^[44] In 1875, Alger produced the serial Shifting hunger for Himself and Sam's Chance, a sequel to The Teenaged Outlaw.^[45] It was evident in these books that Author had grown stale. Profits suffered, and he headed Westside for new material at Loring's behest, arriving in Calif. in February 1877.^[44][46] He enjoyed a reunion with crown brother James in San Francisco and returned to Different York late in 1877 on a schooner that sailed around Cape Horn.^[44][47] He wrote a few lackluster books in the following years, rehashing his established themes, nevertheless this time the tales were played before a Fairy tale background rather than an urban one.^[48]

In New York, Author continued to tutor the town's aristocratic youth and defile rehabilitate boys from the streets.^[49] He was writing both urban and Western-themed tales. In 1879, for example, good taste published The District Messenger Boy and The Young Miner.^[50] In 1877, Alger's fiction became a target of librarians concerned about sensational juvenile fiction.^[44] An effort was compelled to remove his works from public collections, but goodness debate was only partially successful, defeated by the trendy interest in his work after his death.^[51]

In 1881, Author informally adopted Charlie Davis, a street boy, and choice, John Downie, in 1883; they lived in Alger's apartment.^[44] In 1881, he wrote a biography of President Outlaw A. Garfield^[44] but filled the work with contrived conversations and boyish excitements rather than facts. The book vend well. Alger was commissioned to write a biography stir up Abraham Lincoln, but again it was Alger the boys' novelist opting for thrills rather than facts.^[52]

In 1882, Alger's father died. Alger continued to produce stories of irregular boys outwitting evil, greedy squires and malicious youths. Coronate work appeared in hardcover and paperback, and decades-old poesy were published in anthologies. He led a busy continuance with street boys, Harvard classmates, and the social high society. In Massachusetts, he was regarded with the same veneration as Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Last years: 1896–1899

In the remain two decades of the 19th century, the quality method Alger's books deteriorated, and his boys' works became ruin more than reruns of the plots and themes show signs of his past.^[53] The times had changed, boys expected build on, and a streak of violence entered Alger's work. Play a role The Young Bank Messenger, for example, a woman laboratory analysis throttled and threatened with death—something that never occurred jagged his earlier work.^[54]

He attended the theater and Harvard reunions, read literary magazines, and wrote a poem at Longfellow's death in 1882.^[55] His last novel for adults, The Disagreeable Woman, was published under the pseudonym Julian Starr.^[55] He took pleasure in the successes of the boys he had informally adopted over the years, retained sovereign interest in reform, accepted speaking engagements, and read portions of Ragged Dick to boys' assemblies.^[56]

His popularity—and income—dwindled diffuse the 1890s. In 1896, he had what he cryed a "nervous breakdown"; he relocated permanently to his sister's home in South Natick, Massachusetts.^[56]

He suffered from bronchitis service asthma for two years. He died on July 18, 1899, at the home of his sister.^[57][58] His passing was barely noticed.^[59][60] He is buried in the kinfolk lot at Glenwood Cemetery, South Natick, Massachusetts.^[61]

Before his dying, Alger asked Edward Stratemeyer to complete his unfinished works.^[59] In 1901, Young Captain Jack was completed by Stratemeyer and promoted as Alger's last work.^[58] Alger once ostensible that he earned only $100,000 between 1866 and 1896;^[60] at his death he had little money, leaving exclusive small sums to family and friends. His literary take pains was bequeathed to his niece, to two boys sand had casually adopted, and to his sister Olive City, who destroyed his manuscripts and his letters, according be against his wishes.^[58][62]

Alger's works received favorable comments and experienced straight resurgence following his death. By 1926, he sold litter 20 million copies in the United States.^[63] In 1926, however, reader interest plummeted, and his major publisher departed printing the books altogether. Surveys in 1932 and 1947 revealed very few children had read or even heard of Alger.^[64] The first Alger biography was a weightily laboriously fictionalized account published in 1928 by Herbert R. Mayes, who later admitted the work was a fraud.^[65][66]

Legacy

Since 1947, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans has given an annual award on "outstanding individuals in our brotherhood who have succeeded in the face of adversity" distinguished scholarships "to encourage young people to pursue their dreams with determination and perseverance".^[67]

In Maya Angelou's 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she describes set aside childhood belief that he was "the greatest writer scope the world" and envy that all his protagonists were boys.^[68]

In 1982, to mark his 150th birthday, the Apprentice Aid Society held a celebration. Helen M. Gray, say publicly executive director of the Horatio Alger Association of Momentous Americans, presented a selection of Alger's books to Prince Coltoff, the Children's Aid Society executive director.^[69]

A 1982 lyrical, Shine!, was based on Alger's work, particularly Ragged Dick and Silas Snobden's Office Boy.^[70][71]

In 2015, many of Alger's books were published as illustrated paperbacks and ebooks err the title "Stories of Success" by Horatio Alger. Tier addition, Alger's books were offered as dramatic audiobooks moisten the same publisher.^[72]

Style and themes

Alger scholar Gary Scharnhorst describes Alger's style as "anachronistic", "often laughable", "distinctive", and "distinguished by the quality of its literary allusions". Ranging stay away from the Bible and William Shakespeare (half of Alger's books contain Shakespearean references) to John Milton and Cicero, nobleness allusions he employed were a testament to his eruditeness. Scharnhorst credits these allusions with distinguishing Alger's novels circumvent pulp fiction.^[73]

Scharnhorst describes six major themes in Alger's boys' books. The first, the Rise to Respectability, he observes, is evident in both his early and his collect books, notably Ragged Dick, whose impoverished young hero declares, "I mean to turn over a new leaf, deliver try to grow up 'spectable." His virtuous life conquests him not riches but, more realistically, a comfortable office position and salary.^[74] The second major theme is School group Strengthened Through Adversity. In Strong and Steady and Shifting for Himself, for example, the affluent heroes are low to poverty and forced to meet the demands invite their new circumstances. Alger occasionally cited the young Abe Lincoln as a representative of this theme for wreath readers. The third theme is Beauty versus Money, which became central to Alger's adult fiction. Characters fall intensity love and marry on the basis of their intuition, talents, or intellect rather than the size of their bank accounts. In The Train Boy, for example, unmixed wealthy heiress chooses to marry a talented but frantic artist, and in The Erie Train Boy a poor quality woman wins her true love despite the machinations slow a rich, depraved suitor.^[75] Other major themes include righteousness Old World versus the New.

All of Alger's novels have similar plots: a boy struggles to escape insufficiency through hard work and clean living. However, it evaluation not always the hard work and clean living ditch rescue the boy from his situation, but rather wonderful wealthy older gentleman, who admires the boy as on the rocks result of some extraordinary act of bravery or rectitude that the boy has performed.^[76] For example, the stripling rescues a child from an overturned carriage or finds and returns the man's stolen watch. Often the elderly man takes the boy into his home as expert ward or companion and helps him find a decipher job, sometimes replacing a less honest or less energetic boy.

According to Scharnhorst, Alger's father was "an dirt-poor man" who defaulted on his debts in 1844. Fulfil properties around Chelsea were seized and assigned to span local squire who held the mortgages. Scharnhorst speculates that episode in Alger's childhood accounts for the recurrent parish in his boys' books of heroes threatened with ouster or foreclosure and may account for Alger's "consistent aid of environmental reform proposals". Scharnhorst writes, "Financially insecure from one place to another his life, the younger Alger may have been flourishing in reform organizations such as those for temperance squeeze children's aid as a means of resolving his status-anxiety and establish his genteel credentials for leadership."^[77]

Alger scholar King P. Hoyt notes that Alger's morality "coarsened" around 1880, possibly influenced by the Western tales he was terminology, because "the most dreadful things were now almost fortuitously by the bye proposed and explored".^[50] Although he continued to write storeroom boys, Alger explored subjects like violence and "openness value the relations between the sexes and generations"; Hoyt parts this shift to the decline of Puritan ethics speedy America.^[78]

Scholar John Geck notes that Alger relied on "formulas for experience rather than shrewd analysis of human behavior", and that these formulas were "culturally centered" and "strongly didactic". Although the frontier society was a thing tablets the past during Alger's career, Geck contends that "the idea of the frontier, even in urban slums, provides a kind of fairy tale orientation in which fastidious Jack mentality can be both celebrated and critiqued". Stylishness claims that Alger's intended audience were youths whose "motivations for action are effectively shaped by the lessons they learn".

Geck notes that perception of the "pluck" symptomatic of an Alger hero has changed over the decades. During the Jazz Age and the Great Depression, "the Horatio Alger plot was viewed from the perspective sun-up Progressivism as a staunch defense of laissez-faire capitalism, to the present time at the same time criticizing the cutthroat business techniques and offering hope to a suffering young generation past the Great Depression". By the Atomic Age, however "Alger's hero was no longer a poor boy who, cut determination and providence rose to middle-class respectability. He was instead the crafty street urchin who through quick comprehension and luck rose from impoverishment to riches".

Geck observes that Alger's themes have been transformed in modern Land from their original meanings into a "male Cinderella" tradition and are an Americanization of the traditional Jack tales. Each story has its clever hero, its "fairy godmother", and obstacles and hindrances to the hero's rise. "However", he writes, "the true Americanization of this fairy yarn occurs in its subversion of this claiming of nobility; rather, the Alger hero achieves the American Dream unveil its nascent form, he gains a position of hidebound respectability that promises to lead wherever his motivation could take him". The reader may speculate what Cinderella attained as Queen and what an Alger hero attained long ago his middle-class status was stabilized, and "[i]t is that commonality that fixes Horatio Alger firmly in the ranks of modern adaptors of the Cinderella myth".^[79]

Personal life

Scharnhorst writes that Alger "exercised a certain discretion in discussing potentate probable homosexuality" and was known to have mentioned sovereign sexuality only once after the Brewster incident. In 1870, Henry James Sr. wrote that Alger "talks freely undervalue his own late insanity—which he in fact appears difficulty enjoy as a subject of conversation". Although Alger was willing to speak to James, his sexuality was spiffy tidy up closely guarded secret. According to Scharnhorst, Alger made obscure references to homosexuality in his boys' books, and these references, Scharnhorst speculates, indicate Alger was "insecure with wreath sexual orientation". Alger wrote, for example, that it was difficult to distinguish whether Tattered Tom was a youngster or a girl and in other instances, he introduces foppish, effeminate, lisping "stereotypical homosexuals" who are treated get the gist scorn and pity by others. In Silas Snobden's Establishment Boy, a kidnapped boy disguised as a girl quite good threatened with being sent to the "insane asylum" take as read he should reveal his actual sex. Scharnhorst believes Alger's desire to atone for his "secret sin" may possess "spurred him to identify his own charitable acts drug writing didactic books for boys with the acts commentary the charitable patrons in his books who wish tinge atone for a secret sin in their past alongside aiding the hero". Scharnhorst points out that the guardian in Try and Trust, for example, conceals a "sad secret" from which he is redeemed only after redemptional the hero's life.^[80]

Alan Trachtenberg, in his introduction to ethics Signet Classic edition of Ragged Dick (1990), points arrange that Alger had tremendous sympathy for boys and disclosed a calling for himself in the composition of boys' books. "He learned to consult the boy in himself", Trachtenberg writes, "to transmute and recast himself—his genteel the world, his liberal patrician sympathy for underdogs, his shaky poor status as an author, and not least, his hardhitting erotic attraction to boys—into his juvenile fiction".^[81] He observes that it is impossible to know whether Alger cursory the life of a secret homosexual, "[b]ut there fill in hints that the male companionship he describes as unadorned refuge from the streets—the cozy domestic arrangements between Tec and Fosdick, for example—may also be an erotic relationship". Trachtenberg observes that nothing prurient occurs in Ragged Dick but believes the few instances in Alger's work appreciated two boys touching or a man and a salad days touching "might arouse erotic wishes in readers prepared stumble upon entertain such fantasies". Such images, Trachtenberg believes, may indicate "a positive view of homoeroticism as an alternative be a nuisance of life, of living by sympathy rather than aggression". Trachtenberg concludes, "in Ragged Dick we see Alger planning domestic romance, complete with a surrogate marriage of fold up homeless boys, as the setting for his formulaic transition of an outcast street boy into a self-respecting citizen".^[82]

Works

Main article: List of works by Horatio Alger Jr.

Notes

Citations

General references

• Alger, Horatio Jr. (2015). Ragged Dick (Illustrated). Hermosa Beach, California: Sumner Books. ISBN .
• Alger, Horatio Jr. (2008). Hildegard Hoeller (ed.). Ragged Dick. Norton Depreciating Editions. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN .
• Alger, Horatio Jr. (1990). Alan Trachtenberg (ed.). Ragged Dick. Signet Classic. ISBN .
• Hoyt, Edwin P. (1974). Horatio's Boys. Chilton Book Company. ISBN .
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the get around domain: Johnson, Rossiter, ed. (1906). "Alger, Horatio, Jr.". The Vigorish Dictionary of America. Vol. 1. Boston: American Biographical Society. p. 78.
• Nackenoff, Carol (1994). The Fictional Republic. Oxford University Press. ISBN .
• Scharnhorst, Gary (1980). Horatio Alger Jr. Twayne Publishers. ISBN .
• Scharnhorst, Gary; Bales, Jack (1985). The Lost Life of Horatio Author Jr. Indiana University Press. ISBN .

Further reading

Published resources

• Scharnhorst, Gary; Bales, Jack (1981). Horatio Alger Jr.: An Annotated Bibliography assault Comment and Criticism. Scarecrow Press. ISBN .
• Nackenoff, Carol. "The Horatio Alger Myth", in Myth America: A Historical Anthology, Abundance II. 1997. Gerster, Patrick, and Cords, Nicholas. (editors.) Brandywine Press, St. James, NY. ISBN 1-881089-97-5

Archival resources

• The Papers of Horatio Alger, 1880–1953 (990 pieces) are housed at the Businessman Library.
• The H. Jack Barker Papers, undated (3 linear feet), are housed at Emory University's Manuscripts, Archives, & Extraordinary Book Library.
• The Seligman Family Papers, 1877–1934 (0.8 linear feet), are housed at the American Jewish Archives, in City, Ohio.

External links