Horatio Alger

Gary Scharnhorst (University of New Mexico)

Ed. by Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.2: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth Century, 1783-1900.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University)

Dates

Born 13 Jan 1834
Died 13 Jul 1899
Activity 1849-1899

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Biographer
Children's/Young Adult writer
Clergyman
Story-writer

Resources

Alger's Works

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Horatio Alger, Jr., was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to Horatio Alger, an improvident Unitarian minister and farmer, and Olive Augusta Fenno, a distant relative of the poet Charles Fenno Hoffman. After graduating from Harvard College in 1852, Alger worked as a teacher and journalist while contributing poems, stories, and essays to such New England literary weeklies as

Gleason's Pictorial

American Union

, and

True Flag

under a variety of pseudonyms. He entered the Harvard Divinity School in 1857, completing a ministerial course there in 1860, and then travelled for a year in Europe. Ordained the minister of the Unitarian Society in Brewster, Mass., in 1864, he resigned little more than a year later when he was accused of pederasty – a charge he did not deny – whereupon he moved to…

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909 words

Citation: Scharnhorst, Gary. "Horatio Alger". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 March 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=77, accessed 03 December 2024.]