Word: alger
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...emotions Alger describes in his stories are eminently restrained and proper, but according to Biographer Mayes, there were three great passions in Alger's life...
...first mistress, a cabaret singer, he met during a visit to Paris. She lured him to her door and, when Alger hesitated to enter, stamped her foot and snapped: "Don't stand here talking." (Horatio stopped talking.) Mistress No. 2 was an English harpy who abducted him from Mistress No. 1, then treated him cruelly. Alger ran away from her. Mistress No. 3 did not appear until 20 years later. When Alger showed her a list of the furniture he intended to buy, she asked, "Why two beds, Horatio...
Looking for Father. Every popular novel retells some ancient fairy tales. The Alger novel for boys, which is really one book with 130 different titles, is no exception. But the fairy story it repeats is not Jack the Giant Killer, which Alger read in his own boyhood - the eternal fable of the bright boy who made good...
Punishing Papa. Alger, who was never freed from emotional bondage to his own father, found a sort of compensation in telling this one story over & over. In each of his novels he punished his father three times. He killed him before the story opened by making the hero an orphan; he gave Horatio Sr.'s worst traits to the villainous squire; and finally he provided the hero with a new father to cherish...
Struggling Upward, which gives its name to the present volume, is the absolute dead mean and average of all the Alger books. It contains his stock characters, settings and incidents, leading to his stock conclusion. "You need be under no anxiety about Luke and his prospects," says the rich merchant to the hero's widowed mother. "I shall make over to him $10,000 at once, constituting myself his guardian, and will see that he is well started in business...