Ragged Dick or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks - Softcover

A plucky street boy who smokes, gambles, and speaks ungrammatically, Dick is also honest and hardworking. A quintessential novel of adventure, romance, and coming-of-age, it is also an exhilarating tale of one boy's metamorphosis from dirty street urchin to gentleman. Although many scoff at his work today, Horatio Alger Jr. remains the quintessential boys' author of the 19th century. "Ragged Dick" serves as a model for all his other stories as we follow Dick through his rise from rags to riches (or at least middle class respectability.) Alger's talent as a storyteller cannot be denied as the reader is carried along from page to page, eager to find out what will happen to “Ragged Dick” next. A wonderful example of the late 19th century optimism in between the major depressions that plagued America during those years, this inspirational story for children and early adolescents imparts the values of loyalty, hard work, cooperation, persistence. It also provides a first-hand glimpse of post-Civil War New York City. The struggle of the orphans, the advantages of the privileged class, the thieves, the confidence men, the unforgiving hardness of poverty in the pre-Jacob Riis days are all there. And that's what “Ragged Dick” a double winner: it has something for the young and something for the older. Written in the late 1800's, this classic hit upon the "American Dream"—the idea that everyone, from all walks of life, can come to America and be successful in any way in which they want to so long as they work hard and determine to succeed. “Ragged Dick” fulfilled this "Dream" by making his way up in society, and eventually making a wealthy man of himself.

Horatio Alger, Jr. (1834–1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many formulaic juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of respectable middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. He initially wrote and published for adults, but a friendship with boys' author William Taylor Adams led him to writing for the young. He published for years in Adams's Student and Schoolmate, a boys' magazine of moral writings. His lifelong theme of "rags to respectability" had a profound impact on America in the Gilded Age. His works gained even greater popularity following his death, but gradually lost reader interest in the 1920s. Gary Scharnhorst, author of Horatio Alger, Jr., describes Alger's style as "anachronistic", "often laughable", "distinctive", and "distinguished by the quality of its literary allusions." These allusions are what set his work apart from the pulps, Scharnhorst opines, and include the Bible, Shakespeare (in half his books), John Milton, Longfellow, Cicero, Horace, Joseph Addison, Oliver Goldsmith, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, William Cowper, and many others. "By the diversity of his allusions," Scharnhorst writes, "Alger ... both revealed his erudition and enhanced the literary quality of his work."