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Horatio Alger

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Horatio Alger, Jr.
OccupationAuthor
NationalityAmerican
GenreChildren's literature
Notable worksRagged Dick (1868)

Horatio Alger. (January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author, most famous for his novels following the adventures of bootblacks, newsboys, peddlers, buskers, and other impoverished children in their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of respectable middle-class security and comfort. His novels about boys who succeed under the tutelage of older mentors were hugely popular in their day.

Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, the son of a Unitarian minister, Alger entered Harvard University at the age of sixteen. Following graduation, he briefly worked in education before touring Europe for almost a year. He then entered the Harvard Divinity School, and, in 1864, took a position at a Unitarian church in Brewster, Massachusetts. Two years later, he resigned following allegations he had sexual relations with two teenage boys.[1] He retired from the ministry and moved to New York City where he formed an association with the Newsboys Lodging House and other agencies offering aid to impoverished children. His sympathy for the working boys of the city, coupled with the moral values learned at home, were the basis of his many juvenile rags to riches novels illustrating how down-and-out boys might be able to achieve the American Dream of wealth and success through hard work, courage, determination, and concern for others. This widely held view involves Alger's characters achieving extreme wealth and the subsequent remediation of their "old ghosts." Alger is noted as a significant figure in the history of American cultural and social ideals. He died in 1899.

The first full-length Alger biography was commissioned in 1927 and published in 1928, and along with many others that borrowed from it later proved to be heavily fictionalized parodies perpetuating hoaxes and made up anecdotes that "would resemble the tell-all scandal biographies of the time."[2] Other biographies followed, sometimes citing the 1928 hoax as fact. In the last decades of the twentieth century a few more reliable biographies were published that attempt to correct the errors and fictionalizations of the past.

Early years

File:Horatio Alger Jr-young.jpg
Horatio Alger, Jr., Harvard Class of 1852

Alger was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts to Horatio Alger, a Unitarian minister, and Olive Fenno. Horatio, Jr. was tutored at home by his father until the age of ten, when he was admitted to the Gates Academy in Marlborough, Massachusetts. A year after graduating from Gates, he was admitted to Harvard University at age sixteen. For the next four years, he studied under Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with the intention of one day becoming a poet.[citation needed] After graduating, he devoted himself to teaching and writing, with uneven success. Coming to the conclusion that he did not like teaching, he returned to Harvard in 1857 to pursue the ministry. After attending Harvard Divinity School from 1857 to 1860, he took a ten-month tour of Europe and produced works of a patriotic nature.

Ministry

In December 1864, Alger took a position as minister of the First Parish Unitarian Church of Brewster on Cape Cod. At the start of 1866 he resigned, left town, and retired to South Natick, where his father was then the pastor. Church records uncovered after Alger's death indicate that stories had begun to circulate alleging he had relationships with boys in the parish.[3] In letters housed at the Harvard Divinity School, Brewster church officials wrote to the hierarchy in Boston, complaining of "deeds that are too revolting to relate".[4] When confronted, Alger admitted that he had been "imprudent," and chose to leave immediately.[5] His father wrote Charles Lowe, the American Unitarian Association (AUA) general secretary, stating that his son would resign from the ministry and not seek another church. In 2006 the accusations of child sexual abuse resurfaced at an annual fair held in Marlborough, Mass., named in honor of Alger. These led the mayor and other town leaders to change the name to the "Heritage Festival" so as to avoid seeming to celebrate the memory of a child abuser.[6]

New York City

File:RagDickFrontispiece 01.JPG
Frontispiece from Ragged Dick

In 1866 Alger moved to New York City, which proved to be a turning point in his career[4]. He was immediately drawn into the world of impoverished young bootblacks, newspaper boys, and peddlers. He spent much time with young men and often ate his meals and slept at the Newsboys' Lodging House.[citation needed] Alger's empathy with the young working men, coupled with the moral values he learned at home, formed the basis of the first popular work, Ragged Dick, first serialized in 1867 in Student and Schoolmate, a journal of moral literature for children. The success of the tale prompted the publisher A.K. Loring to offer Alger a contract, and, in 1868, Ragged Dick was expanded and published in book format. It proved more popular than its serialization, and generated a vast collection of novels with the same theme: the rise from rags to riches. In fact, the theme became synonymous with Alger, whose formula for success was based on luck, pluck, and virtue.

Essentially, all of Alger's early novels are the same: a young boy struggles to escape poverty through hard work and clean living. However, it is not the hard work and clean living that rescue the boy from his situation, but rather a wealthy older gentleman, who admires the boy as a result of some extraordinary act of bravery or honesty that the boy has performed. For example, the boy might rescue a child from an overturned carriage or find and return the man's stolen watch. Often the older man takes the boy into his home as a ward or companion and helps him find a better job. Although a "Horatio Alger story" has come to signify someone who begins with few resources and ends with vast riches, Alger's characters do not usually become wealthy. His protagonists typically achieve comparatively low-level jobs in companies, often attaining personal stability but not wealth or prominent position. Veteran actor Walter Brennan launched a new television series in 1964, The Tycoon, and entitled the first episode "Horatio Alger Again". In Brennan's ABC series, the character Walter Andrews is an Horatio Alger-style person who did become very wealthy and then used his resources to help others.

Since 1947, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans has bestowed an annual award on "outstanding individuals in our society who have succeeded in the face of adversity" and scholarships "to encourage young people to pursue their dreams with determination and perseverance".[7]

In Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Horatio Alger is mentioned as what could be interpreted as a guide for the protagonist: "How would Horatio Alger handle this situation?" (70). The novel itself is focused around a week-long attempt to discover the American Dream through drugs, degeneracy, and honest curiosity. Thompson references Alger in other scenes, but is most profoundly referenced in the very last sentence of the novel: "I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger ... a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident." (204) [8]

A 1982 musical, Shine!, was based on Alger's work, particularly Ragged Dick and Silas Snobden's Office Boy. It has been performed off and on since, including Off Broadway.[9][10]

Later years

Despite his remarkable literary output, Alger never became rich from his writing. According to legend, he gave most of his money to homeless boys and in some instances was actually conned out of his earnings by boys he tried to help. His books expressed an optimistic wholesomeness no longer popular, but the moral messages they relayed were an important factor in popularizing the American dream. At the time of his death, Alger was living with his sister Augusta and her husband in Natick, Massachusetts. She destroyed all his personal papers at his bequest.[11] He is buried in the family plot in Glenwood Cemetery, South Natick.

Later in life, Alger wrote a poem, "Friar Anselmo's Sin,"[12] which seems to be somewhat autobiographical and strongly resembles Leigh Hunt's "Abou Ben Adhem." (It begins:

Friar Anselmo (God's grace may he win!)
Committed one sad day a deadly sin;
...

The poem goes on to recount the friar's rendering of aid to a wounded traveler and ends with Anselmo's redemption upon the appearance of an angel who exhorts Anselmo to dedicate himself to service:

Thy guilty stains shall be washed white again,
By noble service done thy fellow-men.

Uncompleted works

Novels uncompleted at Alger's death and subsequently completed by Edward Stratemeyer include Out for Business, Falling in with Fortune, Nelson, the Newsboy, Young Captain Jack, Jerry, the Backwoods Boy, Lost at Sea, From Farm to Fortune, The Young Book Agent, Randy of the River, Joe, the Hotel Boy, and Ben Logan's Triumph. Perhaps to capture some of Alger's popularity, Stratemeyer also wrote some of his novels using Alger's name as a pseudonym.

Biographies

In 1928, Herbert R. Mayes published the spurious biography Alger: A Biography without a Hero. This pseudo-biographical novel presented itself as a biography of the well-known author, allegedly based on Alger's diaries and secondary sources consulted by the author. However, in reality those diaries and secondary sources did not exist; Mayes simply made up anecdotes to fill in the gaps in his knowledge of Alger's life. Those stories ranged from the merely speculative — for example, Mayes made Alger's father into a stern, repressive personality who contributed to Alger's semi-repressed homosexuality later in life — to the bizarre. In the latter category, Mayes had his 26-year-old Alger run off to Paris rather than gratify his father with a job in the clergy. Later, in New York, the fictional Alger adopts a young Chinese boy named Wing and cares for him until Wing is conveniently killed by a runaway horse. Mayes said in 1972:

"If Alger ever kept a diary, I knew nothing about it. In any case, it was more fun to invent one. I had no letters ever written by Alger, which was fortunate. Again, it was more fun to make them up, as it was with letters presumably sent to Alger, none of which I had ever seen."

Mayes' fictional biography went practically unquestioned until the 1960s. In 1961, amateur Alger enthusiast Frank Gruber published Horatio Alger, Jr.: A Biography and Bibliography, challenging Mayes' account, and this challenge was followed by Ralph D. Gardner's similarly fact-based 1964 Horatio Alger, or the American Hero Era. (Ironically, these biographies were ill-received by many critics, who preferred Mayes-based works such as John Tebbel's 1963 From Rags to Riches: Horatio Alger and the American Dream.) In the 1970s, Mayes finally admitted the hoax, but statements and anecdotes from A Biography without a Hero continue to turn up in poorly-researched biographies even today. Reliable alternatives include Gary Scharnhorst's Horatio Alger, Jr. (1980) and Carol Nackenoff's The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse (1994).

Works

Cover of a 1900 New York edition of Adrift in New York by Horatio Alger, Jr.

References

  1. ^ UUA Biography http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/horatioalgerjr.html
  2. ^ [1]
  3. ^ Seaburg, Alan, Horatio Alger, Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, retrieved 2007-11-07
  4. ^ a b Huber, Richard (1971), The American Idea of Success, New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 45–6, ISBN 091636643X
  5. ^ [2]
  6. ^ "Allegations of pederasty taint Horatio Alger fair", Columbia Daily Tribune, October 1, 2006, retrieved 2007-11-07
  7. ^ Horatio Alger Award, The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, retrieved 2007-11-07
  8. ^ Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Vintage Books: New York. First Vintage Books Edition, July 1989.
  9. ^ Jones, Kenneth (2001-10-16). "Musical of American Innocence, Shine!, Gets Cast Album". Playbill. Playbill, Inc. Retrieved 2009-02-02.
  10. ^ Shine! The Horatio Alger Musical
  11. ^ [3]
  12. ^ Friar Anselmo's Sin, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, retrieved 2007-11-07

Further reading

  • Nackenoff, Carol. "The Horatio Alger Myth". In Myth America: A Historical Anthology, Volume II. 1997. Gerster, Patrick, and Cords, Nicholas. (editors.) Brandywine Press, St. James, NY. ISBN 1-881-089-97-5
  • Scharnhorst, Gary (1981), Horatio Alger, Jr.: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, ISBN 978-0-8108-1387-8 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Scharnhorst, Gary (1985), The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ISBN 978-0-253-14915-2 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
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