Famous for his rags-to-riches stories, this author forever shaped the way we talk about the American dream

The author’s life story Horatio Algerborn January 13, 1832, spent decades in misconceptions. Many of his papers were destroyedand the first biography his turned out to be one hoax. But that hasn’t stopped his work from becoming ubiquitous in conversations about the American dream.

Thanks to later biographers, Alger’s life story has become clearer. He was the son of a minister in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and early interest writing led him to study classics at Harvard University. He later followed in his father’s footsteps and became a preacher. However, after he was accused of sexually abusing boys in his parish, he was forced out of the church. His father convinced Church leaders were ordered to remain silent and promised that Alger would never work in the clergy again. Alger moved to New York City and began writing extensively.

His outbreak novel, Battered Dickopens with the title shoe shiner waking up in “a wooden box half full of straw,” his bed on the streets of New York City. The reader is quickly introduced to young Dick, who shines boots and has his vices, but works hard.

Thanks to his determination, Dick impresses several wealthy city lords who help him advance financially. What seals the deal, however, is luck: Dick saves a child who falls off a boat and whose father happens to be a successful businessman. He gives Dick a job as a clerk, and Dick drops his nickname and goes by Richard instead, leaving his early days behind completely.

Many of Alger’s 100 or so work contained virtually identical storylines, which often followed alliteratively named boys (such as Paul the Pedlar And Nelson the paper boy) who find their way from poverty to stable careers.

“Alger began his literary career after the end of the Civil War, when most of the wealthy came from wealthy households: he wrote in the spirit of his time, which was imbued with a desire for social mobility,” writes journalist Alissa Quart Bootstrapped: Freeing Ourselves from the American Dream.

The author’s rate was relatively popular (but not among literary critics) in his time: After his death in 1899, obituaries from the Boston sphere and the Harvard graduatesmagazine estimated that his books had sold up to a million copies.

It was after his death that Alger’s derivative stories really took off, selling millions of volumes thanks to reissues of inexpensive editions of his books, historians Gary Scharnhorst and Jack Bales wrote in their 1985 biography of the author: The Lost Life of Horatio Alger Jr. Like the historians notedPublishers rarely reprinted novels in which the protagonists ended the story only on “the bottom rung of the ladder of respectability,” and they edited and abridged the text of those novels they did reprint. As a result, Alger’s “moral hero who becomes modestly successful” became instead “a successful hero who is modestly moral.”

After the books went out of print again in the 1920s, they started doing that remembered as stories of economic triumph and their protagonists as rising business magnates. The stories were recast during World War I and the Great Depression.

“Alger was finally transformed into a patriotic defender of the social and political status quo and former advocate of laissez-faire capitalism,” Scharnhorst and Bales said. wrote.

Although his work wasn’t necessarily Alger’s name continued to be read and became a common reference in newspapers and magazines. It was so become shorthand for the simple story of America’s “self-made man” who used his determination to succeed in a land of equal opportunity, ignoring the older, wealthy men who usually reached out to Alger’s protagonists.

In 1947 the Horatio Alger Association was founded and began handing out an award named after the author, praising people with a story of “overcoming adversity through unyielding perseverance and fundamental moral principles.” With high-profile recipients including President Ronald Reagan and Oprah Winfrey, the award helped keep Alger’s name in the national consciousness.

Even more than a century after his death, Alger is called continues emerge in discussions of the American dream and social mobility – regardless of whether his work is accurately represented or whether its ideas are considered plausible.