Although in the 115 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.
Years before he unleashed his 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, as well as being named Salon's fourth sexiest man of 2011, sandwiched between Aloe Blacc and Thom Yorke. In 2012 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 he is working 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. He's 34.
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