Horatio Alger

Horatio Alger Jr. (1832–1899) was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard in 1852, and was ordained a Unitarian minister, serving a congregation in Brewster, Massachusetts, until 1866, when he was dismissed after a church investigation found he had sexually abused boys in the parish. He moved to New York City, where he volunteered with the Newsboys' Lodging House and turned to writing juvenile fiction full-time; Ragged Dick (1868) established the rags-to-riches formula — a poor boy's rise through pluck, hard work and a timely stroke of luck — that he repeated across more than a hundred subsequent novels for boys, Phil, the Fiddler (1872) among them.