Bound to Rise

An inspirational story about how individual traits and efforts help one to rise and progress. It is the story that eloquently compares and contrasts between two characters: their attitudes, efforts and consequently their success and failure. This book remains an inspiration for young people who are ready to put in efforts and move ahead in life.

If you've ever used the phrase "rags to riches," you owe that to Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832-1899), who popularized the idea through...
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An inspirational story about how individual traits and efforts help one to rise and progress. It is the story that eloquently compares and contrasts between two characters: their attitudes, efforts and consequently their success and failure. This book remains an inspiration for young people who are ready to put in efforts and move ahead in life.

If you've ever used the phrase "rags to riches," you owe that to Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832-1899), who popularized the idea through his fictional writings that also served as a theme for the way America viewed itself as a country. Alger's works about poor boys rising to better living conditions through hard work, determination, courage, honesty, and morals was popular with both adults and younger readers.

Alger's writings happened to correspond with America's Gilded Age, a time of increasing prosperity in a nation rebuilding from the Civil War. His lifelong theme of rags to riches continued to gain popularity but has gradually lessened since the 1920's. Still, readers today often come across Ragged Dick and stories like it in school.

Mr. Alger's stories are in fact as popular now as when first published, because they are pure in tone and inspiring in influence, and many reforms in the juvenile life of New York may be traced to them. Among the best known are:

Strong and Steady; Strive and Succeed; Try and Trust: Bound to Rise; Risen from the Ranks; Herbert Carter's Legacy; Brave and Bold; Jack's Ward; Shifting for Himself; Wait and Hope; Paul the Peddler; Phil the Fiddler: Slow and Sure: Julius the Street Boy; Tom the Bootblack; Struggling Upward; Facing the World; The Cash Boy; Making His Way; Tony the Tramp; Joe's Luck; Do and Dare: Only an Irish Boy; Sink or Swim; A Cousin's Conspiracy; Andy Gordon; Bob Burton; Harry Vane; Hector's Inheritance; Mark Manson's Triumph; Sam's Chance; The Telegraph Boy; The Young Adventurer; The Young Outlaw; The Young Salesman, and Luke Walton.