In an exclusive excerpt from her new book, ‘Bootstrapped,’ author Alissa Quart explains the lie behind the myth of upward mobility in America.
It originated with the tales of the immensely popular Alger himself, who wrote dozens of books with that rags-to-riches plot. After his fourth young-adult book,he wrote roughly 100 other novels, becoming one of the most influential writers of his generation. By 1910, his young-adult novels were selling at a rate of 1 million per year. And throughout the rest of the 20th century, his name was applied widely, and people still more or less knew the author who was its origin point.
But Alger’s life didn’t follow a Horatio Alger story in a crucial way: Alger had a very public fall from grace when he was young, discovered to have engaged in pedophilic acts.
As James Martel, a professor at San Francisco State University and the author of the paper “Horatio Alger and the Closeting of the Self-Made Man,” put it to me, Alger’s “obsession with self-reliance masked his repressed sexuality,” as Alger “sublimated his desire for adolescent boys into a lucrative literary career writing tales for young male readers.”
In addition, the economic contours of his historical moment shaped his plots. Alger started his literary career after the end of the Civil War, when most of the rich came from wealthy households: He was writing in the spirit of his time, which was suffused with a longing for social mobility. Finally, Alger found inspiration in the founding fathers of self-sufficiency, like Benjamin Franklin. Two of Alger’s novels were based loosely on the life of Franklin.
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