ABSTRACT
The “Horatio Alger story,” named for a series of popular nineteenth-century novels for boys, designates a national fantasy of impoverished virtue rewarded, of rags to riches, the American dream, the self-made man. It is well known that Alger’s inspirational tales of class mobility in fact defy the credo of American individualism expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Critical readers are more likely to foreground Alger’s narrative failures, including his books’ deployment of generous benefactors to elevate their young heroes, the very antithesis of self-reliance. Insofar as both Emerson and Alger are concerned with material resources, both show the capitalist transformation of contingency into necessity as outlined by Slavoj Zizek. Alger’s ethos of American success shares with Emerson a vocabulary of self-determination, but it is not, genuinely Emersonian. In narrative terms Alger’s fortunate accidents, so provoking to critics, are entirely necessary: they are, paradoxically, inevitable contingencies.
