This Day in Literary History (Horatio Alger, Creator of Rags-to-Riches Fables, Dies)

July 18, 1899—Nearly a decade after his enormously popular “dime novels” about boys who, to use one of his titles, “Strive and Succeed,” Horatio Alger Jr. died at his sister’s house in his mid-sixties.

The onetime ferociously prolific writer instructed his sister Augusta not only to keep the details of his death private but to destroy as many of his papers as possible. She complied with his wishes. But she could not hide what he undoubtedly had feared, after more than three decades, would resurface, the reason for writing career: the pedophilia charges that brought an abrupt end to his religious ministry in Massachusetts.

The “Horatio Alger Myth”—i.e., that upward social mobility is one of the enduring promises of American life—remains powerful but highly contested even today. The man who promoted the idea more assiduously than anyone else illustrated it through countless stories of young boys on the streets of cities such as New York, Boston and Philadelphia.

Little did his readers know that Horatio Alger had more than a passing interest in boys. After a period of writing tepidly received poems and stories, the former Class Poet of Harvard became minister at the First Unitarian Church and Society of Brewster, Massachusetts.

After a year, however, the popular young minister was confronted with allegations that he had engaged in "practicing on the boys of the church at different times deeds of gross immorality, and a most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys.”

Rather than deny or explain it, Alger listened to the complaint, according to the shocked members of his congregation, “with [the] apparent calmness of an old offender.” He left town on the next train.

Alger went to New York, where he took an interest in youthful bootblacks, peddlers and newspaper boys, taking his meals with them at the Newsboys’ Lodging House. His first rags-to-riches story, Raggedy Dick, was inspired by these encounters.

Total sales of Alger’s books have ranged from 100 to 250 million copies, and he was so popular at one point that his name appeared on the covers of books twice. It’s a safe bet, though, that few of his readers over the years have known of his checkered career.