Horatio Alger

Raised in rural Massachusetts, the son of a Unitarian minister, Horatio Alger Jr. (b. 1832–d. 1899) graduated from Harvard College in 1852 and from the Harvard Divinity School in 1860. Expelled from the Unitarian pulpit in Brewster, Massachusetts, after confessing to a charge of pederasty, Alger moved to New York in April 1866 to begin a career as a full-time writer of fiction for juvenile readers. He published a serialized version of Ragged Dick in 1867 and a revised and expanded book version of the novel, his only bestseller, in 1868. During his career he twice traveled to Europe (1860 and 1873) and to California (1877 and 1890); he was also active in the Harvard Club of New York. To supplement his income from writing, he tutored the children of several prominent Jewish families in New York, including E. R. A. Seligman (b. 1861–d. 1939), later a professor of political economy at Columbia University and a founder of the American Economic Association; Benjamin Cardozo (b. 1870–d. 1938), later an associate justice of the US Supreme Court; and Lewis Einstein (b. 1877–d. 1967), later a career diplomat. Alger was the author of dozens of essays, poems, and short stories, and 103 books for young readers, and toward the end of his career he estimated his total book sales at eight hundred thousand copies. Despite the persistent notion that his heroes rise “from rags to riches,” only a few of his characters earn fabulous wealth. His young heroes normally rise not to riches, but to a secure middle-class respectability. Beginning in the late 1870s, Alger’s juvenile stories came under fire from ministers and professional librarians for their alleged sensationalism. Of 145 libraries surveyed by the American Library Association in 1894, over a third proscribed Alger’s books. Alger died of congestive heart failure at his sister’s home in Natick, Massachusetts, in July 1899. Early in the new century, his popularity began to skyrocket. By 1910, cheap editions of his moral tracts were selling at the rate of about one million annually because, in their idealization of a preindustrial order, they appealed to a nostalgic desire to reform business through a return to principles of equal opportunity and fair trade. The phrase “Horatio Alger hero,” denoting an honest and successful entrepreneurial type, obtained popular if inflated currency in the language in the 1920s, with Alger’s popularity at its peak. Though Alger’s books largely lapsed from print during the Great Depression, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, Inc., cofounded by Norman Vincent Peale (b. 1898–d. 1993), inaugurated the annual Horatio Alger Awards in 1947.