Born January 13: Alger, White, Bourne, Torres

Although in the 114 years since his death, Horatio Alger's stories have become synonymous with "rags to riches," the hard working boys in his novels don't amass fortunes. A typical plot is that a rich older man notices a plucky orphaned lad, witnesses his act of bravery or honor, and sets him up with a decent low-level job in a company, giving him security but not wealth. Often the older man gets the boy to live with him. Alger himself was a bright youth, entering Harvard at 16 and studying with Longfellow. (At left, his graduation photo at 20.) He became a minister but at 34 fled his Unitarian parish in Brewster, Massachusetts after church officials discovered he was having sex with two teenagers. Or, as they said, committing the "most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys." By that time, 1866, Alger had already written nine books for children; he moved to New York City and over the next 33 years wrote 120 more. Despite his prolific production he never became rich. Besotted with bootblacks and street scruffs, he ate often meals and / or slept at the Newsboys Lodging House and gave away his earnings or was conned out of them by the young men he so admired. Except for Ragged Dick, his books did not become bestsellers until years after his death in 1899 at 67 at his sister Augusta's house in Natick. She destroyed all his papers.

Edmund White works a variety of locales, languages, time periods, and literary genres: fiction, travel, memoir, biography, criticism, drama, and cultural observation. In 2009 you learned that he is the contemporary writer John Irving re-reads most often and whose new books he most anticipates. Irving called White's recent fiction, Hotel de Dream [Kindle], "flawless" and said that White's 1982 landmark gay novel A Boy's Own Story far outshines Cather in the Rye. Readers of all stripes owe White thanks for rescuing Jean Genet with his NBCC award-winning biography, and gay readers in particular are indebted to his honesty about sex and his longtime HIV+ status. Generous with his time and influence, he equally promotes gay literature's forgotten gems (Belchamber) and emerging voices (Salvation Army). A professor at Princeton, White has been made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. His popular memoir City Boy was a NYT notable book and a NBCC finalist. Next month sees the paperback release of Jack Holmes and His Friend [Kindle]. He's 73.

In 1995 Matthew Bourne cast male dancers as the swans in Swan Lake and became a sensation throughout the world. Writing in The New Yorker years later, Joan Acocella said, "it made an old love story romantic again, by making it seem dangerous." Other critics called it "a miracle." Contrary to some purist's grumblings, his Swan Lake is not a gimmick. The rigid establishment has embraced it, adding it to the standard A Level syllabus for dance majors in Britain. Extremely in demand to choreograph other people's big West End musicals, Bourne's goal with his own productions is to make dance interesting to people who ordinarily would avoid it. He enlivened the stale favorite The Nutcracker; created a version of Bizet's Carmen called The Car Man with plenty of shirtless greasemonkeys and a homoerotic subplot adapted from The Postman Always Rings Twice; transformed Edward Scissorhands into a full-length dance; and created a piece called Play Without Words, based on the 60s movie The Servant. Acocella's fact piece on Bourne from March 12, 2007 remains the best profile of him, in part because she directly addresses the gay aspect. He says he specifically wants his work to make homosexuality acceptable. He is still planning an all-male version of Romeo & Juliet called Romeo, Romeo and in 2010 unveiled a dance production of The Picture of Dorian Gray. He's 53.

Years before he unleashed his fiery family novella We the Animals [Kindle] in 2011, Justin Torres was already collecting literary honors like a Truman Capote Fellowship at Iowa, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and a United States Artists Rolón Fellowship in 2009. His instant classic is now published in twelve languages and was a finalist or winner of many prizes including those from the NAACP, Publishing Triangle, VCU Cabell, Pitt's Fred Brown Award, and the Indies Choice Book Award, all topped by Justin's being named Salon's fourth sexiest man of 2011, sandwiched between Aloe Blacc and Thom Yorke. This fall he was selected as one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35, chosen to speak at the National Book Festival, and he currently holds a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard where his only job is to work on his second novel, about a gay Puerto Rican hustler in New York City. Two chapters of that book have appeared in Harpers and The New Yorker [free access]. He will read from it at Fay House on Garden St in Cambridge on May 8. He's 33.