SOURCE: "The Boudoir Tales of Horatio Alger, Jr.," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. X, No. 1, 1976, pp. 215–26.

In the following essay, Scharnhorst looks at the humanitarian moralism of Alger's adult fiction.

Horatio Alger, Jr., whose fame rests upon his prodigious output of over a hundred juvenile novels written between 1864 and his death in 1899, also had a career as a writer of adult fiction, although it is generally ignored. Alger published a total of eleven adult novelle between 1857 and 1869, by which time the demand for his juvenile work had substantially increased following the publication in 1867 of his first best seller for boys, Ragged Dick, or Street Life in New York. In addition, during his career Alger published nearly two hundred different short tales in such family and women's magazines as Home Circle, Yankee Blade, and Gleason's Literary Companion. Most of these were also originally written prior to his success...