If literary success is measured by the quantity of books one writes and sells, perhaps New York’s greatest author was Horatio Alger Jr., whose name is welded to the American dream that anyone can rise from rags to riches through his own efforts. Since the 1860s, about half a billion Horatio Alger books have been sold – some 125 novels and 500 short stories, not counting roughly 280 magazine serials never put in book form.

Born on Friday, the 13th of January, 1832 in Revere, Mass., Horatio Alger Jr. was a Unitarian minister’s eldest son who earned baccalaureate and divinity degrees from Harvard. In 1864 Alger serialized his first novel, “Marie Bertrand,” in the New York Weekly. A year later, he published his first juvenile, “Frank’s Campaign,” which told how, while Father fought for the Union, Frank successfully ran the family farm and outwitted the villain who held the mortgage.

Meanwhile, Alger had been called to the pulpit of the First Unitarian Church of Brewster, Mass., on Cape Cod. He was particularly active among the parish’s boys, organizing their games, entertainments, and festivals. Alas, on March 20, 1866, the parish learned “from John Clark and Thomas S. Crocker that Horatio Alger Jr. has been practicing on them at different times deeds that are too revolting to relate.” Alger did not deny the charges, said he had been “imprudent,” and left town on the next train. The charges were soon forgotten and remained so for a century.

Alger traveled straight to Greenwich Village, where he looked up acquaintance William Taylor Adams, editor of Student and Schoolmate magazine, and sold him a serial novel set among New York’s homeless waifs, bootblacks, and newsboys, in whom Alger professed a keen interest. Within days, Adams received the first installments of “Ragged Dick.” This tale of a youth surviving on New York’s mean streets proved amazingly popular: the magazine flew from the newsstands. When published as a book, “Ragged Dick” became a runaway best-seller.

Within five years, Alger would publish seven serial novels in Student and Schoolmate alone. His life became his books: “Fame and Fortune,” “Rough and Ready,” “Rufus and Rose,” “Strive and Succeed,” “Tattered Tom,” “Paul the Peddler,” “Phil the Fiddler,” “Slow and Sure,” “Try and Trust,” “Bound to Rise,” “The Young Acrobat,” “Sam’s Chance,” “Risen from the Ranks,” and dozens more. He worked on several books simultaneously, churning out a few pages of one before boredom set in; turning to another, and another, and then returning to the first. He lived on coffee, working 15 hours at a stretch as the prose gushed from his pen. After writing “Frank and Fearless,” 80,000 words long, in two weeks, he walked around the block and started “Upward and Onward,” which he finished in 13 days. Consequently, his sloppiness was legendary: Alger often forgot whether his current hero was Andy Gordon, Andy Grant, Bob Burton, or Herbert Carter, and a single hero might bear five or six different names in a manuscript.

Alger essentially recycled “Ragged Dick” for some 30 years. His protagonists, whether Tom Temple, Tom Thatcher, or Walter Sherwood, are interchangeable. Whether set in New York, the Wild West, San Francisco, Australia, or England, the stories never change. His writing is cliched and pompous. Heroes assume manly stances and villains charge like bulls. With age, his writing became even more flaccid: “Brave and Bold,” a novel of a factory boy, never shows its hero actually working in a factory, let alone describing the kind of factory in which he was employed. Yet these bad books were great magazine serials: Each episode rises to a climax, leaving ’em panting for more.

Strangely, his books really don’t preach a virile gospel of success through tales of hardworking, go-getting young entrepreneurs. Alger’s heroes are not adventurous youths rising to riches, but male Cinderellas, sycophants pleasing their employers to gain lives of modest comfort. As critic Michael Moon notes, luck – rather than an increased understanding of the world – sets Alger heroes on their ways. Alger’s protagonists are attractive adolescents – “well-formed and strong” or “well-knit,” with “bright and attractive faces” – who, through chance encounters, usually some display of strength and daring, are befriended by older, wealthier men. Often, the relationship seems based upon a quick physical assessment. The lads become proteges and flourish under their mentors’ patronage. And Alger heroes rarely make their fortunes by marrying the boss’s daughter.

Though he died on July 18, 1899, death had no dominion over his output. New novels appeared under his name until World War I as Edward Stratemeyer, future creator of Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew, squeezed them from Alger’s plot outlines and incomplete serials.

The values for which Alger’s books are believed to represent have influenced hundreds of millions of Americans. Not bad for a fugitive.