Horatio Alger, Jr., was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to Horatio Alger, an improvident Unitarian minister and farmer, and Olive Augusta Fenno, a distant relative of the poet Charles Fenno Hoffman. After graduating from Harvard College in 1852, Alger worked as a teacher and journalist while contributing poems, stories, and essays to such New England literary weeklies as Gleason's Pictorial, American Union, and True Flag under a variety of pseudonyms. He entered the Harvard Divinity School in 1857, completing a ministerial course there in 1860, and then travelled for a year in Europe. Ordained the minister of the Unitarian Society in Brewster, Mass., in 1864, he resigned little more than a year later when he was accu

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First published 17 March 2001

Citation: Scharnhorst, Gary. "Horatio Alger". The Literary Encyclopedia. 17 March 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=77, accessed 21 November 2009.]