Struggling Upward
The Minister's Charge and A Cool Million
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8895783 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Graham (0000-0002-8786-6610, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1973 |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 184-196 |
| Publication date | 1973-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-004-02-05 |
| OpenAlex | W2086809554 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
The informing purpose of Nathanael West's A Cool Million; Or, The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (1934) is to destroy the "rags to riches" story popularized by Horatio Alger. A Cool Million would describe, West wrote, "The break-down of the American dream." "I'm re-writing the Horatio Alger myth - from barge boy to president or from shirt-sleeves to shirtsleeves in one generation."1 Not only did West read Alger in preparation for his novel, but he also extensively investigated American success literature.2 A succession of internal parallels indicates that West read and was strongly influenced by William Dean Howells' The Ministers Charge; Or, The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker (1887). Unlike Alger, both Howells and West emphasize the human costs implicit in the illusion that ambition, hard work, and thrift will automatically bring success
American west · Apprenticeship · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Charge (physics · Dream · Ethnology · Literature · Mythology · Operations management · Parallels · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Engineering · History · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |