STRUGGLING UPWARD AND OTHER WORKS —Horatio Alger Jr.—Crown Publishers ($3). Nothing recedes like success. In the field of juvenile literature, Horatio Alger Jr., four of whose novels have just been ...

Dick is a ­teenage bootblack who polishes the shoes of far older, richer men and at night sleeps on New York City’s pavement, sometimes under wagons whose drivers are also asleep. He has an open face ...

Alger’s heroes are working-class adolescent boys who, through hard work, honest dealings, and temperance, rise to live in bourgeois comfort. Herbert Carter’s Legacy (1875) follows one such boy as he ...

YOUNG AMES—Walter D. Edmonds —Atlantic—Little, Brown ($2.50). This is the first novel since Chad Hanna by one of America’s better historical novelists, Walter D. Edmonds. In it he puts that immortal ...

IDEOLOGICALLY,at the age of eight, I was still untouched. Then Horatio Alger’s books came into my life, and my views on politics, sociology, and economics began to take form. I had discovered ...