This Author, Famous for His Rags-to-Riches Stories, Forever Shaped How We Talk About the American Dream

The life story of author Horatio Alger, born on January 13, 1832, spent decades shrouded in misconception. Many of his papers were destroyed, and the first biography of him turned out to be a hoax. But that wouldn’t keep his work from becoming ubiquitous in conversations about the American dream.

Thanks to later biographers, Alger’s life story has become clearer. He was the son of a minister in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and his early interest in writing led him to study classics at Harvard University. Later, following in his father’s footsteps, he became a minister. However, after he was accused of sexually abusing boys in his parish, he was forced out of the church. His father convinced church leaders to keep quiet and promised Alger would never work in the clergy again. Alger moved to New York City and began writing prolifically.

His breakout novel, Ragged Dick, opens with the titular shoe shiner waking up in “a wooden box half full of straw,” his bed on the New York City streets. The reader quickly gets to know young Dick, who polishes boots and has his vices but works hard.

Thanks to his determination, Dick impresses several well-to-do city gentlemen who help him along financially. What seals the deal, though, is luck: Dick rescues a child who falls off a boat whose father just so happens to be a successful businessman. He gives Dick a job as a clerk, and Dick drops his nickname, instead going by Richard, leaving his early days fully behind.

Many of Alger’s roughly 100 works featured nearly identical plotlines, following often-alliteratively-named boys (like Paul the Peddler and Nelson the Newsboy) who make their way from poverty to stable careers.

“Alger started his literary career after the end of the Civil War, when most of the rich came from wealthy households: He was writing in the spirit of his time, which was suffused with a longing for social mobility,” writes journalist Alissa Quart in Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream.

The author’s fare was relatively popular (though not among literary critics) in his time: Upon his death in 1899, obituaries from the Boston Globe and the Harvard Graduates’ magazine estimated his books had sold up to a million copies.

It was after his death that Alger’s derivative tales truly took off, selling millions of volumes thanks to a reissuing of cheap editions of his books, wrote historians Gary Scharnhorst and Jack Bales in their 1985 biography of the author, The Lost Life of Horatio Alger Jr. As the historians noted, publishers rarely reprinted novels where protagonists end the story only on “the bottom rung of the ladder of respectability,” and they edited and abridged the text of the novels they did reprint. As a result, Alger’s “moral hero who becomes modestly successful” became instead “a successful hero who is modestly moral.”

After the books fell out of print again in the 1920s, they began to be remembered as tales of economic triumph and their protagonists as budding business tycoons. The stories took on a new cast during World War I and the Great Depression.

“Alger was at last transformed into a patriotic defender of the social and political status quo and erstwhile advocate of laissez-faire capitalism,” Scharnhorst and Bales wrote.

Though his work wasn’t necessarily still being read, Alger’s name became a common reference in newspapers and magazines. It had become shorthand for the simple story of the American “self-made man” who used his determination to succeed in a land of equal opportunity—ignoring the older, wealthy men who usually lent a hand to Alger’s protagonists.

In 1947, the Horatio Alger Association was established and began distributing an award named after the author, lauding those with a story of “overcoming adversity through unyielding perseverance and basic moral principles.” With high-profile recipients including President Ronald Reagan and Oprah Winfrey, the award has helped keep Alger’s name in the national consciousness.

Even more than a century after his death, Alger’s name continues to crop up in discussions of the American dream and social mobility—regardless of whether his work is accurately portrayed or its ideas thought plausible.

Teresa Nowakowski | | READ MORE

Teresa Nowakowski is a print and multimedia journalist based in Chicago. They cover history, arts and culture, science, travel, food and other topics.