Books: Exalted Alger

YOUNG AMES—Walter D. Edmonds —Atlantic—Little, Brown ($2.50).

This is the first novel since Chad Hanna by one of America's better historical novelists, Walter D. Edmonds. In it he puts that immortal American, the Horatio Alger hero, into period pants. The period: the 1830s, in Manhattan.

Heretofore Edmonds' novels have rambled through the past of his native upstate New York, chiefly along the towpaths of the Erie Canal. He put the canal and its folkways into Rome Haul, Erie Water, Chad Hanna. He deserted the ditch only long enough to write his most successful novel,...