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Successful Failure. Although he was a great success by popular standards, the real Alger was a failure by his own, and his father's rules. Horatio Sr., a Unitarian clergyman in Chelsea, Mass., wanted his oldest son to become a great Boston preacher like Dr. William Channing or Edward Everett Hale. He made the boy read Plato and Josephus (in translation) at the age of eight, and taught him Latin at nine. When parishioners called, Father Alger would ask, "What are you going to be, Horatio?" Horatio Jr. would stutter: "I shall be a t-teacher of the ways of God, a p-preach-er of His commandments, a wiberal thinker, a woyal citizen." Schoolmates called him "Holy Horatio."
At Harvard, Horatio was the smallest man (5 ft. 2) in the class of 1852, ranked eighth in his studies and wrote the class ode. As a senior, Horatio noted in his diary: "Am reading Moby Dick, and find it exciting. What a thrilling life the literary must be! ... Would it be desirable for me to take up writing as a life work? The satisfaction resulting from a beautiful story must be inspiring—a story that rouses readers to a new sense of the fine things of life." From that moment his ambition was fixed: he would write the great American novel.
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 in the band that was organized at the Newsboys' Lodging House, where he spent most of his leisure hours.
The emotions Alger describes in his stories are eminently restrained and proper, but according to Biographer Mayes, there were three great passions in Alger's life.
His 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?"
Looking for Father. Every popular novel retells some ancient fairy tales. The Alger novel for boys, which is really one book with 130 different titles, is no exception. But the fairy story it repeats is not Jack the Giant Killer, which Alger read in his own boyhood — the eternal fable of the bright boy who made good.
It is the Greek myth of Telemachus, the supposed orphan who found his father (Ulysses) and thus came into his kingdom.