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Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832 – 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many formulaic juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of 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 children's magazine of moral writings. His lifelong theme of 'rags to riches' had a profound impact on America in the Gilded Age[1].Alger was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1832, and entered Harvard College at age sixteen. At seventeen he became a professional writer with the sale of a few literary pieces to a Boston magazine. Following graduation, he worked briefly as an assistant editor for a Boston magazine before teaching in New England boys' schools for a few years. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1860, wrote in support of the Union cause during the American Civil War, and accepted a ministerial post with a Unitarian church in Brewster, Massachusetts in 1864. He left the church in 1866 following an internal investigation regarding sexual misconduct involving two teenage boys of the parish. He denied nothing, and relocated to New York City.Between 1864 and 1866 Alger published his first boys' books: Frank's Campaign (1864), Paul Prescott's Charge (1865), and Charlie Codman's Cruise (1866). His literary niche was made secure in 1868 with his fourth boys' book Ragged Dick, the story of a poor bootblack's rise to middle-class respectability. The book was a great success. His many boys' books that followed were essentially variations on Ragged Dick and featured a cast of stock characters – the valiant youth, the noble mysterious stranger, the snobbish youth, and the evil squire.The "Horatio Alger myth" is the rags to riches message in his books. The rags to riches theme which has been associated with Alger’s stories is in no way accurate, as his heroes rarely become extremely wealthy. His characters usually hold “low-level jobs in companies, often attaining personal stability but not wealth or prominent position.” Some of Alger’s novels assert that material wealth is insignificant unless it is paired with middle-class respectability. For Alger’s characters, wealth was the product of a meritocracy, and the direct consequence of “honesty, thrift, self-reliance, industry, a cheerful whistle and an open manly face.” However, in some of Alger’s works there is also an implied belief in hereditary determinism, explicitly contrasting achievement based on merit.During the 1930s and 1940s, Alger’s works were virtually out of print and many commentators seemed to have regarded Alger as a propagandist, saying“the author who celebrated capitalist markets and insisted that in the United States, any poor boy with patience and an unwavering commitment to hard work can become a dazzling success.”
“the potential greatness of the common man, rugged individualism, [and] economic triumph.”
[1]In United States history, the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States during the post–Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th century. The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their book “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today”. The name refers to the process of gilding an object with a superficial layer of gold and is meant to make fun of ostentatious display while playing on the term "golden age".The Gilded Age is most famous for the creation of a modern industrial economy. During the 1870s and 1880s, the U.S. economy rose at the fastest rate in its history, with real wages, wealth, GDP, and capital formation all increasing rapidly. For example, between 1865 and 1898, the output of wheat increased by 256%, corn by 222%, coal by 800% and miles of railway track by 567%. Thick national networks for transportation and communication were created. The corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations.
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America. Although not one of Twain's better-known works, it has appeared in more than one hundred editions since its original publication. Twain and Warner originally had planned to issue the novel with illustrations by Thomas Nast. The book is remarkable for two reasons–-it is the only novel Twain wrote with a collaborator, and its title very quickly became synonymous with graft, materialism, and corruption in public life.
"To gild refined gold, to paint the lily... is wasteful and ridiculous excess."
Washington Hawkins, the eldest son who has drifted through life on his father’s early promise that he would be “one of the richest men in the world,” finally gives up the family's ownership of the still-unimproved land parcel when he cannot afford to pay its $180 of taxes. He also appears ready to overcome his passivity: "The spell is broken, the life-long curse is ended!" Philip, drawing upon his engineering skills, discovers coal on another characters land, wins that characters daughters heart and appears destined to enjoy a prosperous and conventionally happy marriage.
Charles Dudley Warner (1829 – 1900) was an American essayist, novelist, and friend of Mark Twain, with whom he co-authored the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.Warner travelled widely, lectured frequently, and was actively interested in prison reform, city park supervision, and other movements for the public good. He was the first president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and, at the time of his death, was president of the American Social Science Association. He first attracted attention by the reflective sketches entitled My Summer in a Garden (1870; first published in The Hartford Courant), popular for their abounding and refined humour and mellow personal charm, their wholesome love of outdoor things, their suggestive comment on life and affairs, and their delicately finished style. Charles Dudley Warner is known for making the famous remark,“Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
This was quoted by Mark Twain in a lecture, and is still commonly misattributed to Twain.
Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832 – 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many formulaic juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of 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 children's magazine of moral writings. His lifelong theme of 'rags to riches' had a profound impact on America in the Gilded Age[1].
