Word: algerism
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WEDNESDAY: Little Caesar. (1950). Horatio Alger story of the Syndicate with Edward G. Robinson as the rags-to-offers-you-can't-refuse hero...
...Alger was no Charles Dickens, but he shared Dickens' social indignation, if not his gift for expressing it. "Fair" and "just" are two of his favorite words, and genuine feeling enters his prose when he describes a skinflint like Snobden or a hypocrite like Gideon Chapin, his chief clerk- Alger's American Murdstones and Uriah Heeps...
...debt-ridden parson, Alger did not have to invent his scenes of poverty. His happy endings may smack blandly of fantasy, but his harsh beginnings have the bite of realism. Like all Alger heroes, Frank Manton is first and last a survivor in a tough world - a world, Alger makes protestingly plain, of child labor, a world in which a wom an working as a seamstress might earn as little...
Like Dickens, Alger loved this world despite all the cruelty and cor ruption. His Wall Street district scenes give off a certain jolly hum. He describes a midtown brownstone as if his nose were pressed against the window. Writing of nickel rides on the el or six-course meals (wine included) for 75?, he exudes a kind of festivity...
Reading an Alger novel, Playwright S.N. Behrman once said, is like taking a shower in innocence. Alger could not hate even his villains. The kidnapers in Silas Snobden's Office Boy are half hearted scoundrels, outstandingly stupid rather than wicked...