Horatio Alger

Horatio Alger was an American 19th-century writer whose popular novels portrayed poor boys achieving success through honesty, hard work, and perseverance.

Ragged Dick: An 1868 novel by Horatio Alger about a poor New York bootblack whose honesty and effort lead to advancement. This novel established the rags-to-respectability pattern associated with Alger.
Rags-to-riches narrative: A story pattern in which a person rises from poverty to wealth or social prominence. Alger’s novels became a leading American form of this narrative pattern.
Chelsea, Massachusetts: A city in Massachusetts where Horatio Alger was born in 1832. Alger’s New England upbringing preceded his literary career and shaped its cultural setting.
American Dream: A national ideal that opportunity and individual effort can enable people to improve their lives. Alger’s fiction supplied enduring popular images of the dream’s promise of upward mobility.
William T. Adams: An American writer and editor who published boys’ books under the name Oliver Optic. Adams was a contemporary whose popular boys’ fiction shared Alger’s market and audience.
Strive and Succeed: A Horatio Alger novel about a poor boy whose perseverance helps him rise in life. Its title states the moral logic that recurs throughout Alger’s fiction.
Social mobility: Movement by individuals or groups between positions in a society’s economic or status hierarchy. His plots make upward movement the central reward for moral conduct and effort.
Harvard University: A university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1636. Alger graduated from Harvard in 1852 before teaching and later writing fiction.
Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans: A nonprofit organization that honors achievement and supports scholarships for young people facing adversity. The organization adopted Alger’s name as a symbol of perseverance and opportunity.
Oliver Optic: The pen name of American boys’ author William T. Adams. This rival popular identity illustrates the crowded juvenile fiction market in which Alger wrote.

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B. C. ForbesRelated: Forbes’s writing celebrated enterprise and self-made success, themes often associated with Alger.