Helping Himself

Horatio Alger wrote a lot of these books, and Helping Himself fits the pattern most readers expect from him. Grant Thornton, a teenage boy from a small town, gets pushed into New York City after his father dies. He has to figure out how to survive, work honestly, and not get cheated by the city’s various sharks along the way.

If you’ve read Ragged Dick or any of Alger’s other young man novels, you know the shape of it. Hard work pays. Decent people end up rewarded eventually. The villains tend to overplay their hand.

It was published in 1886 and reads that way. Some of the social attitudes feel dated now. But as a window into Gilded Age fiction for boys, it still holds interest, and the prose moves quickly enough that it doesn’t feel like a slog.