Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks is arguably the best known of Horatio Alger's American rags-to-riches stories. It is canonical as a cultural text, rather than a purely literary one, as this Norton Critical Edition reflects. An extensive "Contexts" section includes maps, photographs, and documents showing how and why Alger used the backdrop of New York City to highlight problems of urban poverty, immigration, and child labor in mid-nineteenth century America.

List of Illustrations

Preface

The Text of Ragged Dick

Contexts

  ALGER ON HIS ART AND LIFE

Horatio Alger, Jr. · Friar Anselmo

  · Are My Boys Real?

Edward G. Alcorn · Advice from Horatio Alger, Jr.

Horatio Alger, Jr. · Writing Stories for Boys

  THE NEW YORK CITY BACKGROUND

F. J. Ottarson · New York and Its People

MAP: Dick's tour through the New York City of the 1860s

James D. McCabe, Jr. · Street Children

Edward Crapsey · Outcast Children

Charles Loring Brace · Homeless Boys

Clark Kidder · From Orphan Trains and Their

  Precious Cargo

Criticism

CONTEMPORARY REVIE·rS

Tangled Threads

Putnam's Magazine

  WHO SHOULD READ ALGER? ALGER AND THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

Charles C. Cutter * The Public Library, and Its Choice

  of Books

S. S. Green · Sensational Fiction in Public Libraries

Peccator · As to Novel-reading---A Confession

S. S. Green · Class Adaptation in the Selection of

  Books--The Fiction Question

Fletcher Free Library, Burlington, Vermont · Annual

  Report

Young Men's Association, Buffalo · Annual Report

Unsigned Review · Books for Young People

ALGER·S LEGACY: PARODIES AND RESPONSES

Stephen Crane · A Self-Made Man

Gilbert W. Gabriel · The Alger Complex

James Thurber · Tom the Young Kidnapper, or, Pay Up

  and Live

Amiri Baraka · The Death of Horatio Alger

Victor Wilson · LegendaryAlger Was a Homosexual

Gary Scharnhorst · DemythologizingAlger

CRITICAL ESSAYS

Mary Roth Walsh · Selling the Self-Made Woman

Michael Moon · "The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous

  Classes": Pederasty, Domesticity, and Capitalism in

  Horatio Alger

Glenn Hendler · Pandering in the Public Sphere:

  Masculinity and the Market in Horatio Alger

Hildegard Hoeller · Freaks and the American Dream:

  Horatio Alger, P. T. Barnum, and the Art of Humbug

Horatio Alger, Jr.: A Chronology

Selected Bibliography