Work and Win

Oliver Optic was the pen name of William Taylor Adams, a Massachusetts writer who became one of the most prolific producers of boys’ fiction in mid to late nineteenth century America. His total output runs into more than a hundred novels, many of them published in long running series, and at the height of his popularity in the 1860s and 1870s his books outsold even Horatio Alger Jr. The two writers were sometimes pitted against each other by critics of the era, with some of the more genteel commentators arguing that Optic’s adventure focused stories encouraged less wholesome values than Alger’s earnest morality tales.

Work and Win is one of Optic’s many novels for boys, working in the same general territory as the rest of his catalogue. The protagonist is typically a young man at the start of his working life, facing some combination of family difficulty, financial hardship, and moral choice. Through honest labor, perseverance, and the kind of luck that the genre always provided to deserving heroes, the protagonist works his way up the social and economic ladder to a position of respectability by the end of the book. The plotting is brisk, the moral lessons are obvious, and the period assumptions about race, class, and gender are very much present.

Optic’s books were so popular in their time that he was eventually censured by the Boston Public Library and other respectable institutions for being too exciting and not sufficiently improving. The fact that boys preferred Optic to many of his more decorous competitors is now part of the historical interest of his work. He understood what his audience wanted and gave it to them in language they could read.

For scholars of nineteenth century American children’s literature, of the dime novel and story paper traditions, or of the wider print culture that shaped American boyhood in the post Civil War decades, Optic’s work is essential. For general readers, his books are now historical curiosities more than living literature, but they retain the propulsive energy that made them so popular in their day.