Horatio Alger: All 34 Rags-to-Riches Novels, Free to Read Online
"A Horatio Alger story" has become shorthand for a rags-to-riches climb, usually said by someone who has never read one. It is worth reading one, because the phrase gets the books almost exactly backwards.
Alger published over a hundred novels between 1867 and 1899, nearly all with the same protagonist: a boy of fourteen or so, poor, honest, alone in New York or on his way there. What actually lifts him is not work. He works throughout and it earns him board. What lifts him is a piece of luck he did not arrange and could not have — he stops a runaway carriage, returns a dropped pocketbook, is recognised by a stranger as the missing heir — and the moral of the book is that he had made himself the kind of boy that luck would land on. That is a more interesting and much more anxious idea than the slogan suggests, and it is on the surface of every one of these books.
Thirty-four are in the free library. Here is how to read them.
Start with Ragged Dick
Ragged Dick (1867) is the one that made him, and it is the best of them by a distance. Dick is a bootblack sleeping in a wooden box on Spruce Street, and the book's real subject is the mechanics of respectability: what a room costs, what a bank account is, why he starts paying a smarter boy to teach him to read at night. Alger had been a chaplain at the Newsboys' Lodging House and the material is reported rather than invented, which is why the New York in it is so exact.
Its two sequels follow Dick upward:
2. Fame and Fortune; or, The Progress of Richard Hunter — Dick in a clerk's job, now called by his real name. 3. Rufus and Rose — a different boy in the same world.
The first one, which is about the Civil War
Frank's Campaign (1864) — Alger's first book for boys, and the odd one out. Frank wants to enlist; instead he stays and runs the family farm so an older neighbour can go in his place, against a squire holding the mortgage and waiting. The formula is not assembled yet — the luck is smaller and the work matters more — which makes it the most interesting book here to read against Ragged Dick.
The street-trade books, which are the ones worth reading
These are the good ones, because Alger is writing about a job he had watched being done.
- Phil, the Fiddler (1872) — the most serious book he wrote. Phil is an Italian boy leased to a padrone who sends him out to busk and beats him if he brings back too little. Alger was campaigning against the padrone system and the novel contributed to legislation against it. If you read a second Alger, read this.
- Paul the Peddler — a boy building a business from a necktie stand upward, and the closest thing here to a straight account of small enterprise.
- Dan, the Newsboy — has a genuine mystery plot in it.
- Tom, the Bootblack
- The Cash Boy — a department-store runner; good on the tedium and the humiliation of the job.
- The Store Boy
- The Errand Boy
- Joe the Hotel Boy
- Randy of the River — a Hudson River steamboat, and a change of scene that does the formula good.
The disputed-inheritance books
Alger's other engine. A boy is cheated of a legacy by a guardian, uncle or stepfather, leaves, makes his way, and returns with proof. Structurally these are melodramas rather than success stories.
- Hector's Inheritance — half school story, which lifts it.
- A Cousin's Conspiracy
- Making His Way
- Driven from Home
- Try and Trust — an indentured boy and a genuinely nasty master.
- Jack's Ward
- Timothy Crump's Ward
- Paul Prescott's Charge — an early one, set partly in a poorhouse.
- Walter Sherwood's Probation — unusually, a rich boy who has to earn it.
- Chester Rand — the hero is a cartoonist, which is the most unexpected profession in the whole run.
- Cast Upon the Breakers — unpublished in his lifetime; found in a trunk and printed in 1974.
- Bound to Rise and its follow-on Helping Himself
- Do and Dare
- Only an Irish Boy — Alger deliberately making his hero Irish at a time when that was a statement.
- From Farm to Fortune
The Western and frontier ones
Late Alger, when the New York material had run out and he sent the boys west.
- The Young Miner — the Gold Rush.
- The Young Explorer
- Ben's Nugget
- The Young Acrobat — a travelling circus, and the most fun of the late books.
And one that is not fiction
From Canal Boy to President — Alger's campaign biography of James A. Garfield, written at speed in 1881 and finished after Garfield was shot. It is the Alger formula applied to a real life, which is either the most revealing thing he wrote or the most cynical, depending on how charitable you feel.
How to read three and stop
Ragged Dick for the original, Phil, the Fiddler for the one with real anger in it, and Paul the Peddler for the clearest look at how a boy in 1870s New York actually made money. After three you will have the formula completely and the other thirty-one will hold no surprises — which is not a criticism of Alger, who was writing for an audience that wanted exactly that.
All thirty-four are public domain and free to read in the browser here, with nothing to install and no account needed to start. They are all on one author page.
For neighbouring shelves: 102 books filed under conduct of life, which is where the Victorians put moral instruction for the young, and 11 books about boys. For the same era with better prose, our guide to classic adventure novels.