Book Report: Strive and Succeed by Horatio Alger (1967)

It has been three years since I bought this book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale, but it seemed to fit thematically with the audio course The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin and re-reading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, so I picked this two-book collection from the top right corner of the stacks in my office.

It contains:

• Julius, or the Street Boy Out West (1874), wherein an orphan who lived with a burglar is out on his own after going to the authorities when the burglar and an accomplice plan a burglary at the home of someone who has done Julius a turn. Julius resettles “out West” (in this case, Wisconsin, near “Milwaukie” [sic]) with the help of an aid society in New York (a real concern that Alger promoted in a number of his books), gets an education, earns the trust of the family that accepts him into their home, becomes successful, averts tragedy when the burglar accomplice who has broken out of Sing Sing comes looking for him.
  
   
• The Store Boy, or the Fortunes of Ben Barclay (1887), wherein the son of a widow works in the local grocery store, but the local money man is going to foreclose on her mortgage unless they can come up with the $700 in a couple of months. It seems impossible, but the boy made friends on a buying trip to New York and has a chance to work for a wealthy woman whose distant cousins try to sabotauge the relationship, fearing he will inherit. He gets the drop on them, and a menacing tramp turns into an ally who helps them not only pay the morgage but to put the local money man and his ne’er-do-well son in their place.

So they both tell rags-to-riches story, but in both cases, the urchins have help from people who appreciate that they’re honest and hardworking. So it’s definitely not akin to an Ayn Rand novel where the protagonists succeed despite how much the world is against them. In Alger’s world, bad people do oppose the young heroes, but other good people help them. Which might have represented a shift in the zeitgeist between the mid- to late-ninteenth century to the post-World War I world.

The books also feature a couple of interesting duplicated scenes; in both, the protagonist spots a pickpocket at work, and calling him out leads to a rewarding situation beyond a monetary reward. And in both, the young men are given nice watches. It’s a small sample size from Alger’s work, but one wonders if it’s a common element or if the books just happened to have the repeated scenes which were so similar.

At any rate, the language was approachable–the books were written for young people, after all–back in the time where boys read books and when the heroes of books were like better versions of the readers themselves or certainly encouraging peers. Unlike much of the YA you see talked about these days, where the protagonists are all special or superhuman or who have to deal with dystopias unlike what the readers will encounter (hopefully) or where the protagonists represent something in Proper Contemporary Thought and who have to navigate the patriarchy that wants to keep the faddishly different down.

I flagged something in one of the books, and it’s true of both of them: Alger has a city sense of scale. He talks about something a mile and a half away being distant. He talks about Ben Barclay picking up someone to give her a ride for a half mile. That might seem like a long way off if you’re used to living in the city, but here in the country, a mile off is…. visible. Not that far at all. You can always tell someone lived entirely in cities and maybe visited the country when they talk like that. Although, to be honest, when Thoreau in Walden talks distances, they’re not that great, either, so maybe it’s more of an East Coast/New England thing where the sense of scale is different.

So not as inspirational as the Franklin, but better than what you might get from the 20th century.