Word: horatio
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Street & Smith, Nick Carter (in real life, Colonel Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey) pounded out a novel (30,000 words) a week. Burt L. Standish (William Gilbert Patten) manufactured 30,000 words a month about Frank Merriwell. Other S. & S. standards: Oliver Optic (William T. Adams), Horatio Alger...
Father Complex. Horatio Alger never even wrote an outline for the novel, although he was still dreaming about it when he died (1899). In fact, Alger never succeeded in freeing himself from his father's domination, never quite grew up. At the age of 50, he still liked to play with blocks. He sometimes disguised himself in a long cape and a tousled wig and went wandering through Manhattan's streets - in search of material, he said. He preferred the company of bootblacks and match boys to that of adults. He liked to beat the big drum...
...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...
...Horatio's hero is always a prince in disguise, playing the part of a fiddler, a bootblack, a hired boy, but with at tractive, cheerful and resolute features under the dirt. His mother, always a widow, is tormented by the village squire, who plays the joint role of Penelope's suitors. The hero meets a stranger and rescues his child from drowning (or from a mad dog or a runaway horse). The stranger turns out to be a rich merchant, who gives the boy new clothes, then sends him on a mission, a sort of knightly quest...
...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...