Horatio Algerby KPB ’10–’12

Sears & Roebuck Catalog, Fall 1922
Books

The Fastidious Newsboy and His Triumph
By Horatio Alger

Join the spinster of our age Mr. Horatio Alger as he relates the lurid and fantastical tale of a sharp but down-on-his-luck newsboy born into poverty who rises from rags to riches by dint of his own hard work and industry.

From Farm to Fortune; or Nat Nason’s Strange Experience
By Horatio Alger

Mr. Horatio Alger is at it again. Fortune is the tale of a young man’s struggle to escape a life of poverty and the well into which his father jettisons him at the age of nine. For five years, the boy is fed by a crude pulley-drawn contraption that contains food fit only for dogs. Through hard work and industry, the boy eventually escapes the well and overcomes his enfeebled body to participate in a rags to riches tale fit for only the most American of readers.

The Village Peddler Boy Becomes Rich through Hard Work
By Horatio Alger

The author of our age Mr. Horatio Alger invites you to examine the tale of a seriously impoverished young man who through a series of mishaps loses the sensation of touch. As the boy struggles to cope with his polio diagnosis, he develops a morphine addiction, which he finances through the selling of nude pictures. His father, who enters the Great War as an infantryman, asphyxiates on chlorine gas and dies an undignified death on the Eastern Front. Through hard work and industry, the little rascal is eventually able to recover over the course of five years from a debilitating automobile accident to become a rags to riches newspaper millionaire.

Shoeshine Boy Gets Rich
By Horatio Alger

Here we join Mr. Horatio Alger and a deaf mute shoeshine boy who develops his own language through a system of biting and then bloodying his right arm. After alienating his family, the boy is taken in by a group of Romanians who frequently abuse him. One day, his surrogate father is fired from his job for being a lazy and helpless layabout, and he punishes the boy by beating him within an inch of his life with a stick that is traditionally used to fight armed criminals. The boy eventually moves his surrogate father’s Coca Cola on accident and is subsequently beaten again, this time with an actual shillelagh. He escapes in the middle of the night by crawling through the sewer, wherein he is bitten by a creature that is too big to be a rat. Through hard work and industry, the boy eventually recovers to own an American company and uses the money earned to buy fake teeth.

The Road to Success
By Horatio Alger

Mr. Horatio Alger begins his latest tale when a confused, mentally disfigured man collapses on the steps of the Louvre. As museum officials attempt to discern his identity, a boy in Topeka, Kansas is shot in the head five times in a freak accident wherein five magnum revolvers discharge at random five consecutive times within the span of a minute. The boy is pronounced dead on the scene. He is buried and awakes from a coma sixteen years later to find that he is trapped inside of a coffin some thirty feet underground. As he prays for daylight, the boy realizes that taking in short bursts of breathes will keep him alive longer, as opposed to the normal sort of breathing that relies on a sustained rhythm with less panting. Eventually, a landslide frees the coffin and the boy, now a man, realizes that he has spent a majority of his life legally dead. Returning to his childhood home, the man defecates on the front lawn while shouting “Howards!” and running in bizarre octagonal but strangely coffin-like patterns. He is carted away to a sanatorium, wherein he spends the rest of his sexually potent years in a straightjacket. Through hard work and industry, the man eventually overcomes dyslexia and shoeshines his way to the top of the newspaper industry.