An explanation is given at
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cinder/bio.htm
The initial perpetrator to this century of misrepresentation is
Herbert Mayes, who in 1927 was contracted to write the first full
biography of the author. After a few days of research, in which a lack
of evidence and many close-lipped contemporaries of Alger confounded
Mayes, he decided to write instead a parody of Alger that would
resemble the tell-all scandal biographies of the time. As Mayes
himself confessed later:
"Here was a project that with scant trouble that I felt I
could handle in a matter of months or even weeks. All I had to do was
come up with a fairy tale...the going was easy, particularly when I
decided to quote copiously from Alger's diary. If Alger ever kept a
diary, I knew nothing about it" (Mayes' commentary is drawn from
"After Half a Century," an introduction to a reissue of his biography,
Alger: A Biography Without a Hero ).
The end result of Mayes' work was a near total fiction; hardly any
truth remained, save Alger's name and the books he wrote. Despite his
intentions to have the book clearly recognized as humor, Mayes was
quite surprised to find his audience accept it as a reliable work:
"As anyone who has read my book is aware, I made Alger out
to be a pathetic, quite ridiculous character. I provided him with
mistresses. I had him adopt and become attached to a little Chinese
boy, and then had the boy killed by a runaway horse...I put in the
mind of the character I created the delusion that some day he might be
President of the United States." |
