Horatio Alger, Jr.

Horatio Alger, Jr. (January 13, 1832–July 18, 1899) was a 19th-century American author who wrote 135 dime novels.

Many of his works have been described as rags to riches stories, 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. The widely-held view involves a significant simplification, as Alger's characters do not typically achieve extreme wealth, but middle-class security, stability, and solidity of reputation -- that is, their efforts are rewarded with a place in society, not domination of it. He is noted as a significant figure in the history of American cultural and social ideals.

Though often repetitive, Alger's novels remain popular. As bestsellers in their own time, Alger's books rivaled those of Mark Twain in popularity.

Biography

Alger was born in Chelsea, now Revere, Massachusetts on January 13,1832, to a stern Unitarian minister who wanted his son to follow him into the religious world. He 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 Gates, he was admitted to Harvard at age 16. For the next four years he studied under Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with the intention of one day becoming a poet. After graduating he devoted himself to teaching and writing, with uneven success. Coming to the conclusion he did not like teaching, he returned to Harvard in 1857 to pursue the ministry.

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

After attending Harvard Divinity School, from 1857 to 1860, he took a ten-month tour of Europe, and produced more works of a patriotic nature. In December, 1864, Reverend Alger took a position as minister of the First Parish Unitarian Church of Brewster on Cape Cod. At the start of 1866 he abruptly 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 concerning his conduct with two teenage boys in the parish. These were investigated and proved to be true.

In letters now housed at the Harvard Divinity School, Brewster church officials wrote to the hierarchy in Boston, complaining "that Horatio Alger, Jr. has been practicing on [the boys of the church] at different times deeds that are too revolting to relate." Later they are related: "gross immorality, and a most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys. . . . which he neither denied or attempted to extenuate but received it with apparent calmness of an old offender—and hastily left town on the very next train for parts unknown."[1]

In response to complaints by the church, Alger Sr. wrote Charles Lowe, the AUA general secretary, stating that his son would resign from the ministry and not seek another church. All the parties involved agreed to keep matters quiet - the parents of the boys reluctantly. Alger only discussed this incident once, in 1870, with psychologist William James.[2]

Later in life, Alger wrote a poem, "Friar Anselmo's Sin,"[2] which seems to be somewhat autobiographical. 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.

The move to New York was a turning point in Alger's career. He was immediately drawn into the work of impoverished young bootblacks, newspaper boys, and peddlers. It was this world, coupled with the moral values Alger received at home, that formed the basis of the first novel in his Ragged Dick series (1867). The book was an immediate success, spurring a vast collection of sequels and similar novels, including Luck and Pluck (1869) and Tattered Tom (1871), all 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 novels are the same: a young boy struggles through hard work to escape poverty. However it is not the hard work itself that rescues the boy from his fate, but rather a wealthy older gentleman, who has become aware of the boy and his situation as a result of some extraordinary act of bravery or honesty which the boy has performed. The older gentleman then takes the boy in as a ward. The precipitating act might be that the boy returns a large sum of money that was lost or that he rescues someone from an overturned carriage.

In addition, few if any of the boy-heroes in his tales ever achieve wealth. Although "Horatio Alger story" has come to signify someone who begins with few resources and ends with vast riches, his protagonists typically achieve comparatively low-level jobs in companies, often ending as clerks or in roles we would describe as "entry level." They are more about getting to the first rung in the climb to urban middle class status than about fantasies of hitting the mother lode.

Despite his remarkable literary output, Alger never became rich from his writing. He gave most of his money to homeless boys and in some instances was actually conned from his earnings by the boys he tried to help. Nevertheless, by the time he died in 1899, his books could be found in virtually every home and library in America. His books may no longer be as popular today as they once were, but the moral messages they relayed were an important factor in the development of the American dream in the 20th century. At the time of his death, Alger was living with his sister Augusta in Natick, Massachusetts. She destroyed all of his personal papers.

Since 1947, the Horatio Alger Association 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".[3]

In 2006 the accusations of pederasty resurfaced at an annual fair held in Marlborough in honor of the writer. These led the mayor and other town leaders to announce intentions of changing the name of the fair so as to avoid seeming to celebrate the memory of a man now considered by them a child abuser.[3]

The Mayes biography

In 1928, a man named Herbert R. Mayes published the book Alger: A Biography without a Hero, which purported to be a biography of the well-known author based on his diaries. However, in reality those diaries 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 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."[4]

Mayes' fictional biography went virtually 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 the "research" evidenced by Mayes-based books such as John Tebbel's 1963 From Rags to Riches: Horatio Alger and the American Dream.[5]) 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).

Mayes also made up several book titles for his faked bibliography.

Works

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

Notes

  1. ^ Richard Huber, The American Idea of Success (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), pp 45-46
  2. ^ UUA biography of Horatio Alger [1]
  3. ^ "Allegations of pederasty taint Horatio Alger fair" Colombia Daily Tribune, October 1, 2006

Resources

See also

External links

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