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Horatio Alger

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Horatio Alger, Jr.
Born(1832-01-13)January 13, 1832
Chelsea, Massachusetts, United States
DiedJuly 18, 1899(1899-07-18) (aged 67)
Natick, Massachusetts, United States
Pen nameCarl Cantab
Arthur Hamilton
Caroline F. Preston
Arthur Lee Putnam
Julian Starr
OccupationAuthor
NationalityAmerican
Alma materHarvard College, 1852
GenreChildren's literature
Notable worksRagged Dick (1868)

Horatio Alger, Jr. (/ˈældʒər/; January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many young-adult fiction novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. His writings were characterized by the "rags to riches" narrative, which had a formative effect on America during the Gilded Age.

Essentially, all of Alger's juvenile novels share the same theme, known as the "Horatio Alger myth": a teenage boy works hard to escape poverty. Often though, it is not the hard work itself that rescues the boy from his fate, but rather some extraordinary act of bravery or honesty. The boy might return a large sum of lost money or rescue someone from an overturned carriage. This brings the boy—and his plight—to the attention of a wealthy individual.

Alger secured his literary niche in 1868 with the publication of his fourth book, Ragged Dick, the story of a poor bootblack's rise to middle-class respectability. This novel was a huge success. His many books that followed were essentially variations on Ragged Dick and featured casts of stock characters: the valiant hard-working, honest youth, the noble mysterious stranger, the snobbish youth, and the evil, greedy squire.

In the 1870s, Alger's fiction was growing stale. His publisher suggested he tour the American West for fresh material to incorporate into his fiction. Alger took a trip to California, but the trip had little effect on his writing: he remained mired in the tired theme of "poor boy makes good." The backdrops of these novels, however, became the American West rather than the urban environments of the northeastern United States.

In the last decades of the 19th century, Alger's moral tone coarsened with the change in boys' tastes. Sensational thrills were wanted by the public. The Puritan ethic had loosened its grip on America, and violence, murder, and other sensational themes entered Alger's works. Public librarians questioned whether his books should be made available to the young. They were briefly successful, but with the first decades of the 20th century, interest was renewed in Alger's novels and they sold in the thousands. By the time he died in 1899, Alger had published around a hundred volumes. He is buried in South Natick, Massachusetts. Since 1947, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans has awarded scholarships and prizes to deserving individuals.

Biography

Childhood: 1832–1847

Horatio Alger, Jr. was born in the New England coastal town of Chelsea, Massachusetts, on January 13, 1832, to Horatio Alger, a Unitarian minister, and his wife Olive Augusta Fenno.[1][2]

His credentials with the New England aristocracy of the early nineteenth century were impeccable: he was the descendant of Pilgrim Fathers Robert Cushman, Thomas Cushman, and William Bassett. He was also the descendant of Sylvanus Lazell, a Minuteman and brigadier general in the War of 1812, and Edmund Lazell, a member of the Constitutional Convention in 1788.[3]

Horatio's siblings Olive Augusta and James were born in 1833 and 1836, and an invalid sister Annie and a brother Francis in 1840 and 1842.[4] Alger was a precocious boy afflicted with myopia and asthma,[5][6] but Alger, Sr. decided early that his eldest son would one day enter the ministry, and, to that end, he tutored the boy in classical studies and allowed him to observe the responsibilities of ministering to parishioners.[7]

Alger began attending the Chelsea Grammar School in 1842,[8] but by December 1844 his father's financial troubles had increased considerably and, in search of a better salary, he moved the family to Marlborough, Massachusetts, an agricultural town 25 miles west of Boston. He was installed as pastor of the Second Congregational Society in January 1845 with a salary sufficient to meet his needs.[9] Horatio attended Gates Academy, a local preparatory school,[8] and completed his studies at age fifteen.[10] He published his 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] The fourteen-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 described Harvard at this time as "provincial and local because its scope and outlook hardly extended beyond the boundaries of New England; besides which it was very denominational, being held exclusively in the hands of Unitarians".[11]

Alger on Harvard Commencement Day, July 1852

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

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

His first book, a collection of short pieces called Bertha's Christmas Vision: An Autumn Sheaf, was published in 1856, and his second book, a lengthy satirical poem called Nothing to Do: A Tilt at our Best Society, was published in 1857.[21] He attended Harvard Divinity School from 1857 to 1860, and upon graduation, he did a tour of Europe.[22] In the spring of 1861, he returned to a nation in the throes of the American Civil War.[23] Drafted but exempted from military service for health reasons in July 1863, he wrote in support of the Union cause and hobnobbed with New England intellectuals. He was elected an officer 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 his first boys' book Frank's Campaign was published by A. K. Loring in Boston the same year.[25] Alger initially wrote for adult magazines, including Harper's Magazine and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper but a friendship with William Taylor Adams, a boys' author, led him to write for the young.[26]

Ministry: 1864–1866

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

Child sexual abuse

Early in 1866 a church committee of men was formed to investigate reports of Alger having sexually molested boys. Church officials reported to the hierarchy in Boston that Alger had been charged with "the abominable and revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys".[33] Alger denied nothing, admitted he had been imprudent, considered his association with the church dissolved, and left town.[34][35] Alger sent Unitarian officials in Boston a letter of remorse, and his father assured them his son would never seek another post in the church. Officials were satisfied and decided no further action would be taken.[36]

New York City: 1866–1896

Alger relocated to New York City, abandoned forever any thought of a career in the church, and focused instead on his writing. He wrote "Friar Anselmo" at this time, a poem that tells of a sinning cleric's atonement through good deeds. He became interested in the welfare of the thousands of vagrant children who flooded New York City following the Civil War. He attended a children's church service at Five Points which led to "John Maynard", a ballad about an actual shipwreck on Lake Erie that brought Alger not only the respect of the literati but a letter from Longfellow. He published two poorly received adult novels, Helen Ford and Timothy Crump's Ward. He fared better with stories for boys published in Student and Schoolmate and a third boys' book Charlie Codman's Cruise.[37]

In January 1867 the first of twelve installments of Ragged Dick appeared in Student and Schoolmate. The story about a poor bootblack's rise to middle class respectability was a huge success. It was expanded, and published as a novel in 1868.[38] It proved to be his bestseller. After Ragged Dick he wrote almost entirely for boys,[39] and signed a contract with publisher Loring for a Ragged Dick Series.[40]

Ragged Dick was first serialized in Student and Schoolmate before being published as a full-length novel.

In spite of the series' success, Alger was on financially uncertain ground and tutored the five sons of international banker Joseph Seligman. He wrote serials for Young Israel,[41] and lived in the Seligman home until 1876.[42] In 1875 Alger produced the serial Shifting for Himself and Sam's Chance, a sequel to The Young Outlaw.[43] It was evident in these books that Alger had grown stale. Profits suffered, and he headed West for new material at Loring's behest, arriving in California in February 1877.[42][44] He enjoyed a reunion with his brother James in San Francisco and returned to New York late in 1877 via a schooner around Cape Horn.[42][45] He wrote a few lackluster books in the following years that rehashed the formulaic Alger of old but this time the tales were played before a Western backcloth rather than an urban one.[46]

In New York, Alger continued to tutor the town's aristocratic youth and to rehabilitate its street boys.[47] He was writing both urban and Western-themed tales. In 1879, for example, he published The District Messenger Boy and The Young Miner.[48] In 1877, Alger's fiction became a target of librarians concerned about sensational juvenile fiction.[42] An effort was made to remove Alger's works from public collections, but the debate was only partially successful, defeated by the renewed interest in Alger's work after his death.[49]

In 1881, Alger informally adopted Charlie Davis, a street boy, and another, John Downie, in 1883; they lived in Alger's apartment.[42] In 1881, he wrote President James A. Garfield's biography,[42] but filled the work with contrived conversations and boyish excitements rather than facts. The book sold well. Alger was commissioned to give Abraham Lincoln a biographical treatment but again it was Alger the boys' novelist opting for thrills rather than facts.[50]

In 1882, Alger's father died. Alger continued to produce stories of honest boys outwitting evil, greedy squires, and malicious youths. His work appeared in hardcover and paperback, and decades-old poems were published in anthologies. He led a busy life with the street boys, his Harvard classmates, and the social elite. In Massachusetts, he was regarded with the same reverence as Harriet Beecher Stowe. He tutored with never a whisper of scandal.[citation needed]

Last years: 1896–1899

Alger's gravestone at Natick, Massachusetts

In the last two decades of the 19th century, the quality of Alger's books deteriorated and his boys' works became nothing more than reruns of the plots and themes of his past.[51] The times had changed, boys expected more, and a streak of violence entered Alger's work. In The Young Bank Messenger, for example, a woman is throttled and threatened with death—an episode that would never have occurred in his earlier work.[52]

He attended the theater and Harvard reunions, read the literary magazines, and wrote a poem at Longfellow's death in 1892.[53] His last novel for adults, The Disagreeable Woman, was published under the pseudonym Julian Starr.[53] He took pleasure in the successes of the boys he had informally adopted over the years, retained his interest in reform, accepted speaking engagements, and read portions of Ragged Dick to boys' assemblies.[54]

His popularity—and income—dwindled in the 1890s. In 1896, he had (what he called) a "nervous breakdown"; he relocated permanently to his sister's home in South Natick, Massachusetts.[54]

He suffered from bronchitis and asthma for two years. He died on July 18, 1899 at the home of his sister in Natick, Massachusetts.[55][56] His death was barely noticed.[57][58]

Before his death, Alger asked Edward Stratemeyer to complete his unfinished works.[57] In 1901, Young Captain Jack was completed by Stratemeyer and promoted as Alger's last work.[56] Alger once estimated that he earned only $100,000 between 1866 and 1896;[58] at his death he had little money, leaving only small sums to family and friends. His literary work was bequeathed to his niece, to two boys he had casually adopted, and to his sister Olive Augusta, who destroyed his manuscripts and his letters at his wish.[56][59]

Alger's works received favorable comments and experienced a resurgence following his death; up until the advent of the Jazz Age in the 1920s, he sold about seventeen to twenty million volumes.[citation needed] In 1926, however, reader interest plummeted and his major publisher ceased printing the books altogether. Surveys in 1932 and 1947 revealed very few children had read or even heard of Alger.[citation needed] The first Alger biography was a heavily fictionalized account published in 1928 by Herbert R. Mayes, who later admitted the work was a fraud.[60][61]

Legacy

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".[62]

In 1982 to mark his 150th birthday, the Children's Aid Society held a celebration. Helen M. Gray, the executive director of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, presented a selection of Alger's books to Philip Coltoff, the Children's Aid Society executive director.[63]

A 1982 musical, Shine!, was based on Alger's work, particularly Ragged Dick and Silas Snobden's Office Boy.[64][65]

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 from the Bible and William Shakespeare (half of Alger's books contain Shakespearean references) to John Milton and Cicero, the allusions he employed were a testament to his erudition. Scharnhorst credits these allusions for distinguishing Alger's novels from pulp fiction.[66]

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 late books, notably in Ragged Dick, whose young impoverished hero declares: "I mean to turn over a new leaf, and try to grow up 'spectable." His virtuous life wins him not riches but, more realistically, a comfortable clerical position and salary.[67] The second major theme explores Character Strengthened Through Adversity. In Strong and Steady and Shifting for Himself, for example, the affluent heroes are reduced to poverty and forced to meet the demands of their new circumstances. Alger occasionally cited the young Abe Lincoln as a representative of this theme for his readers. The third theme is Beauty versus Money, which became central to Alger's adult fiction. Characters fall in love and marry based on their character, talents, or intellect rather than the size of their bank accounts. In The Train Boy, for example, a wealthy heiress chooses to marry a talented but struggling artist and in The Erie Train Boy a poor woman wins her true love despite the machinations of a rich, depraved suitor.[68] Other major themes include the Old World versus the New.

All of Alger's novels rework the same plot: a young boy struggles to escape poverty through hard work and clean living. However, it is not always 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 (sometimes replacing a less honest or industrious boy).

According to Scharnhorst, Alger's father was "an impoverished man" who defaulted on his debts in 1844. His properties around Chelsea were seized and assigned to a local squire who held the mortgages. Scharnhorst speculates this episode in Alger's childhood accounts for the recurrent theme in his boys' books of heroes being threatened with eviction or foreclosure, and may account for Alger's "consistent espousal of environmental reform proposals". Scharnhorst writes "Financially insecure throughout his life, the younger Alger may have been active in reform organizations such as those for temperance and children's aid as a means of resolving his status-anxiety and establish his genteel credentials for leadership."[69]

Alger scholar Hoyt notes that Alger's morality "coarsened" around 1880, possibly influenced by the Western tales he was writing, because "the most dreadful things were now almost casually proposed and explored".[48] Although he continued to write for boys, Alger explored subjects like violence and "openness in the relations between the sexes and generations"; Hoyt attributes this shift to the decline of Puritan ethics in America.[70]

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 of 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 a Jack mentality can be both celebrated and critiqued". He 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" characteristic 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 of Progressivism as a staunch defense of laissez-faire capitalism, yet at the same time criticizing the cutthroat business techniques and offering hope to a suffering young generation during the Great Depression". By the Atomic Age, however "Alger's hero was no longer a poor boy who, through determination and providence rose to middle-class respectability. He was instead the crafty street urchin who through quick wits and luck rose from impoverishment to riches".

Geck observes that Alger's themes have been transformed in modern America from their original meanings into a Male Cinderella myth, 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, "[T]he true Americanization of this fairy tale occurs in its subversion of this claiming of nobility; rather, the Alger hero achieves the American Dream in its nascent form, he gains a position of middle-class respectability that promises to lead wherever his motivation may take him". The reader may speculate what Cinderella achieved as Queen and what an Alger hero attained once his middle class status was stabilized and "[i]t is this commonality that fixes Horatio Alger firmly in the ranks of modern adaptors of the Cinderella myth".

Personal life

Scharnhorst writes that Horatio "exercised a certain discretion in discussing his probable homosexuality" and was known to have mentioned his sexuality only once after the Brewster incident. In 1870 the elder Henry James wrote that Alger "talks freely about his own late insanity—which he in fact appears to enjoy as a subject of conversation". Although Alger was willing to speak to James, his sexuality was a closely guarded secret. According to Scharnhorst, Alger made veiled references to homosexuality in his boys' books and these references, Scharnhorst speculates, indicate Alger was "insecure with his sexual orientation". Alger wrote, for example, that it was difficult to distinguish whether Tattered Tom was a boy or a girl and in other instances he introduces foppish, effeminate, lisping "stereotypical homosexuals" who are treated with scorn and pity by others. In Silas Snobden's Office Boy, a kidnapped boy disguised as a girl is threatened with the "insane asylum" if he should reveal his actual sex. Scharnhorst believes Alger's desire to atone for his "secret sin" may have "spurred him to identify his own charitable acts of writing didactic books for boys with the acts of the charitable patrons in his books who wish to atone for a secret sin in their past by aiding the hero". Scharnhorst points out that the patron in Try and Trust, for example, conceals a "sad secret" from which he is redeemed only after saving the hero's life.[71]

Alan Trachtenberg of Yale University points out in his introduction to the Signet Classic edition of Ragged Dick (1990) that Alger had tremendous sympathy for boys and discovered a calling for himself in the composition of boys' books. "He learned to consult the boy in himself", Trachtenberg writes, "[T]o transmute and recast himself—his genteel culture, his liberal patrician sympathy for underdogs, his shaky economic status as an author, and not least, his dangerous erotic attraction to boys—into his juvenile fiction".[72] He observes that it is impossible to know whether Alger lived the life of a secret homosexual, "[b]ut there are hints that the male companionship he describes as a refuge from the streets—the cozy domestic arrangements between Dick 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 of two boys touching or a man and a boy touching "might arouse erotic wishes in readers prepared to entertain such fantasies". Such images, Trachtenberg believes, may imply "a positive view of homoeroticism as an alternative way of life, of living by sympathy rather than aggression". Trachtenberg concludes "[I]n Ragged Dick we see Alger plotting domestic romance, complete with a surrogate marriage of two homeless boys, as the setting for his formulaic metamorphosis of an outcast street boy into a self-respecting citizen".[73]

Works

Main article: List of works by Horatio Alger, Jr.

Notes

  1. ^ Hoyt 1974, pp. 7,9
  2. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, pp. 17-18
  3. ^ Scharnhorst 1985, pp. 5–6
  4. ^ a b Alger 2008, p. 277
  5. ^ http://www.online-literature.com/horatio-alger/
  6. ^ Scharnhorst 1985, p. 10
  7. ^ Hoyt 1974, pp. 10–11
  8. ^ a b Hoyt 1974, p. 14
  9. ^ Scharnhorst 1985, pp. 11–13
  10. ^ a b c Scharnhorst 1985, p. 14
  11. ^ a b Scharnhorst 1985, p. 15
  12. ^ Scharnhorst 1985, p. 17
  13. ^ Scharnhorst 1985, p. 21
  14. ^ Hoyt 1974, p. 18
  15. ^ Scharnhorst 1985, pp. 18-23
  16. ^ Scharnhorst 1985, pp. 26–27
  17. ^ Scharnhorst 1985, pp. 27–28
  18. ^ Scharnhorst 1985, p. 29
  19. ^ Hoyt 1974, pp. 24,28
  20. ^ Scharnhorst 1985, p. 33
  21. ^ Hoyt 1974, pp. 27–8,30–3
  22. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, p. "Chronology"
  23. ^ Scharnhorst 1985, p. 54
  24. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, p. 26
  25. ^ Hoyt 1974, pp. 40–48
  26. ^ a b Hoyt 1974, pp. 49–50
  27. ^ Scharnhorst 1985, p. 64
  28. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, p. 33
  29. ^ Hoyt 1974, p. 4
  30. ^ a b Scharnhorst 1985, p. 65
  31. ^ Alger 2008, p. 278
  32. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, p. 28
  33. ^ [1]
  34. ^ Hoyt 1974, pp. 1–6,60–63
  35. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, pp. 29–30
  36. ^ Scharnhorst 1985, p. 3
  37. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, pp. 30–34
  38. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, p. 34
  39. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, p. 48
  40. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, p. 35
  41. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, p. 35-6
  42. ^ a b c d e f Alger 2008, p. 279
  43. ^ Hoyt 1974, pp. 184–6
  44. ^ Hoyt 1974, p. 187
  45. ^ Hoyt 1974, pp. 187–8
  46. ^ Hoyt 1974, p. 190
  47. ^ Hoyt 1974, p. 199
  48. ^ a b Hoyt 1974, p. 201
  49. ^ Nackenoff 1994, pp. 250–7
  50. ^ Hoyt 1974, pp. 207–10
  51. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, pp. 44–5
  52. ^ Hoyt 1974, p. 231
  53. ^ a b Scharnhorst 1980, p. 45
  54. ^ a b Scharnhorst 1980, p. 46
  55. ^ "Horatio Alger". New York Times. July 19, 1899. Retrieved 2015-03-04. Horatio Alger, writer of boys' stories died at the home of his sister, Mrs. Amos Cheney at Natick, Massachusetts yesterday. ... {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  56. ^ a b c Hoyt 1974, p. 232
  57. ^ a b Alger 2008, p. 280
  58. ^ a b Scharnhorst 1980, p. 47
  59. ^ Hoyt 1974, pp. 19,252
  60. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, p. 141
  61. ^ Hoyt 1974, p. 251
  62. ^ "Horatio Alger Award". The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans. Retrieved 2007-11-07Template:Inconsistent citations {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  63. ^ Herbert Mitgang (January 14, 1982). "Alger's 150th Year Marked". The New York Times. Retrieved 2015-03-04. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  64. ^ Jones, Kenneth (2001-10-16). "Musical of American Innocence, Shine!, Gets Cast Album". Playbill. Playbill, Inc. Retrieved 2009-02-02.
  65. ^ Shine! The Horatio Alger Musical
  66. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, pp. 73–74
  67. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, pp. 75–76
  68. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, pp. 76–8
  69. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, p. 18
  70. ^ Hoyt 1974, p. 207
  71. ^ Scharnhorst 1980, pp. 37–8
  72. ^ Alger 1990, p. ix
  73. ^ Trachtenberg 1990, pp. ix–x

References

Further reading

Published resources

  • 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 1-881089-97-5
  • Scharnhorst, Gary; Bales, Jack (1981). Horatio Alger, Jr.: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-1387-8.

Archival resources

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