SOURCE: "Reading Alger: Searching for Alger's Audience in the Literary Marketplace," in The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse. Oxford University Press, 1994, pp.181-203.

In the following chapter, Nackenoff identifies Alger's readership within the changing historical context of increased literacy and cheaper availability of books.

Your kind and flattering letter reached me just as I was starting for the Geysers … It gives me great pleasure to find that I have friends and appreciative readers among the girls, as well as among the boys, and on the shores of the Pacific, as well as the Atlantic. I hope at an early date to write a story located in California, and I shall be glad if it proves acceptable to my friends here.

Alger to Miss Harriet Jackson, March 3, 1877¹

The marked surge in the production, dissemination, and reading of literature in the Gilded Age created new readers and...