The Horatio Alger Hoax; or, Why Dissertations Like Mine Ought to Be Written

In 1928, Herbert Mayes published Alger: A Biography Without a Hero.  The young journalist had discovered the lost diary of Horatio Alger, in which the famous author recounted the marriage to Patience Stires his fathered initially opposed and ultimately quashed; one affair with a Parisian café singer and another with a married woman (which, when revealed, forced him from the pulpit); and the adoption and tragic trampling of a Chinese toddler named Wing.  The lost diary provided Mayes with irrefutable evidence of that Alger was a Freudian study in repression, his novels of “luck and pluck” little more than pathetic exercises in psychoanalytic wish-fulfillment. 

In 1938, Kenneth Lynn’s The Dream of Success counted Alger alongside Theodore Dreiser and Jack London as frustrated (in the psychoanalytic sense) little men who pour “out all [their] dammed-up ambitions and repressed desire into more than a hundred novels and countless short stories about adolescent boys who, beginning in poverty and obscurity, took the fabulous city…by storm.”  Lynn’s source was, as you may suspect, Mayes. 

In 1959, Norman Holland followed suit in “Hobbling with Horatio, or the Uses of Literature.”  Holland considered Alger “an emotional cripple” for whom the writing of books was a means of surpassing his father while avoiding direct competition with him.

In 1963, another psychoanalytic critic, John Tebbel, praised Mayes in the introduction to From Rags to Riches: Horatio Alger and the American Dream, saying “it is a tribute to the research he did at twenty-eight to note that it can hardly be improved upon nearly four decades later.  The primary sources of Alger material are meager, indeed, but Mr. Mayes appears to have examined all of them, and no new original material has turned up in the intervening decades.” 

In 1964, amateur collector and Alger enthusiast Ralph Gardner published Horatio Alger, or The American Hero Era, in which he declared that, given the paucity of biographical information, “some situations were dramatized and dialogue created, but always within the framework of existing facts.”  Reviewers discredited Gardner’s speculative biography, calling it a “whitewash” and noting its patent inferiority to Professor Tebbel’s stylishly Freudian account.  Tebbel’s academic credentials are significant: because Gardner was “an admirer,” Cecil B. Williams argued in American Literature (March, 1965), “he includes only what suited the image he wanted to present, omitting Patience Stires, Wing, and the illicit affairs, but emphasizing young Alger’s standing in his Harvard class and the prizes he won for Greek prose.”  The coup de grace: “Tebbel’s book is indexed; Gardner’s is not.”  Instead of extrapolation, Williams suggests, it is better to mourn the fact that “no new original material [had] turned up” since 1928.  Except some had.

In 1961, another amateur collector and Alger enthusiast, Frank Gruber, had privately published Horatio Alger, Jr: A Biography and Bibliography of the Best Selling Author of All Time. In it, Gruber noted that he had been “compelled to discard virtually everything in [Mayes’] book with one single exception, the date of his birth.  Even the date of his death is wrong.”  There had been no Parisian café singers.  No married women.  No oddly named Chinese toddlers trampled to death by runaway horses.  There had not even been a lost diary.  And you want “whitewashing”: according to Unitarian Church records, Alger’s sudden departure from his parish was not due to his illicit affair with a married woman but the accusations by two young boys that he had performed “deeds too revolting to relate” with them.  Apparently none of the 750 editions of his book Gruber published made it into the hands of academics.  (And if they had, they would no doubt have dismissed his work with the same air of superiority with which they would later dismiss Gardner’s.) 

Finally, in the late 1970s, Mayes confessed: “As anyone who has read my book is aware, I made Alger out to be a pathetic, quite ridiculous character. I provided him with mistresses. I had him adopt and become attached to a little Chinese boy, and then had the boy killed by a runaway horse.”  By 1985 the first scholarly account of Alger’s life (Gary Scharnhorst and Jack Bales’ The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr.) hit the shelves. 

What should the Alger hoax teach us about scholarship?  First, never trust a biographer who flubs the date his subject died.  Second, when secondary sources eclipse their primary counterparts as the authoritative account of a life or an event, the odds of an error being compounded in perpetuity increase.  Dramatically.  Third, that had Mayes done his research, he would have realized that his subject (an apparent pederast) possessed a far richer vein of Freudian neuroses and psychoses than Mayes suspected…and that I find that irony hilarious beyond the telling.

Comments

[Josh]

Frank Gruber, the taxonomist of the Western and author of screwball crime novels from the late Thirties on? Amazing.

[Custom Dissertations]

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