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: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg 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

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 …

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909 words

Citation: Scharnhorst, Gary. "Horatio Alger". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 March 2001 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=77, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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