“Ain’t Any Chance to Rise in the Paper Business”: Poverty, Race, and Horatio Alger’s Newsboy Novels

Emily Gowen holds a PhD in English literature from Boston University. Her book project, “On the Margins: Steady-Sellers and the Problem of Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America,” has been supported by fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the Boston University Center for the Humanities. Her work has appeared in American Literature and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. She is currently the John B. Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society.