Word: algerism
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Holy Horatio Alger! Of all the embarrassing national memories to bring up in 1973. This little prince of prissiness, this walking morality play on behalf of hanging tight and doing somebody else's thing. "Duty required me to do as I did." The cry, pure as the adolescent uttering it, sounds across the years-from 1889, to be exact-measuring by sheer alienation the distance of America present from America past...
...this young anachronism speaking for the Protestant ethic? Frank Manton happens to be a lately discovered Alger hero, previously presented in an 1889 magazine serial but never collected in hard-cover among the more than 100 novels of Alger-style success that have sold from 100 million to 400 million copies, depending on which literary historian you believe...
...mother and stands up to a stepfather of "intemperate habits," not to mention an assortment of other bullies. Young Frank finally rescues a rich man's child from kidnapers, thus earning himself the gratitude of that good old deus ex machina known as the Benefactor, without whom no Alger novel is complete. But before everybody rolls over in another fit of giggles at the naive old 19th century, certain facts should be noted...
...Alger was not all that bad a writer...
...Harvard education behind him, including lots of Latin and Greek and a course or two under Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A lifelong bachelor, Alger was rather disastrously prone to the unintentional double-entendre -e.g., "Imogene laid herself out to entertain him." But he was also capable of modestly cynical repartee: "When a man gets to be 51, marriage is very hazardous." "It always...