Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward Paperback / softback - 2012

From the 1860's through the 1890s, Horatio Alger wrote hundreds of novels to teach young boys the merits of honesty, hard work, and cheerfulness in the face of adversity. A prolific author, Alger was best known for his many formulaic juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of respectable middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. He initially wrote and published for adults, but a friendship with boys' author William Taylor Adams led him to writing for the young. He published for years in Adams's Student and Schoolmate, a boys' magazine of moral writings. His lifelong theme of "rags to respectability" had a profound impact on America in the Gilded Age. His works gained even greater popularity following his death, but gradually lost reader interest in the 1920s. Gary Scharnhorst, author of Horatio Alger, Jr., describes Alger's style as "anachronistic", "often laughable", "distinctive", and "distinguished by the quality of its literary allusions." These allusions are what set his work apart from the pulps, Scharnhorst opines, and include the Bible, Shakespeare (in half his books), John Milton, Longfellow, Cicero, Horace, Joseph Addison, Oliver Goldsmith, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, William Cowper, and many others. "By the diversity of his allusions," Scharnhorst writes, "Alger ... both revealed his erudition and enhanced the literary quality of his work." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.