Reading Alger: Searching for Alger s Audience in the Literary Marketplace

Abstract Your kind and flattering letter reached me just as I was starting for the Geysers ... It gives me great pleasure to find that I have friends and appreciative readers among the girls, as well as among the boys, and on the shores of the Pacific, as well as the Atlantic. I hope at an early date to write a story located in California, and I shall be glad if it proves acceptable to my friends here. Alger to Miss Harriet Jackson, March 3, 877 The marked surge in the production, dissemination, and reading of literature in the Gilded Age created new readers and new reading tastes. Rising literacy, increased leisure for some, a spreading national network of reading matter available for purchase and loan, and declining price of fiction helped make readers out of new classes. Especially after 880, these factors worked in conjunction with growing family incomes to produce changes in reading propensities, buying habits, and tastes. Much of the reading was fiction.