Horatio Alger's rags-to-riches juvenile novels of poor boys parlaying "luck and pluck'' into "fame and fortune"' did much to shape and popularize the American success myth. This is a biography of the intensely private man. Ousted from a Unitarian pulpit in Brewster, Massachusetts, in 1866 for sodomizing young boys, Alger spent the final half of his life obscuring his past, and ordered all personal papers burned after his death in 1899. In 1927, the essential Alger was further obscured when Herbert Mayes published a fabricated biography based on a nonexistent diary which "exposed'' Alger as a lecher who wrote to fund his travels in pursuit of a married woman.