All of Alger's juvenile novels share essentially the same theme, known as the "Horatio Alger myth": a teenage boy works hard to escape poverty. Often it is not hard work that rescues the boy from his fate but rather some extraordinary act of bravery or honesty. The boy might return a large sum of lost money or rescue someone from an overturned carriage. This brings the boy-and his plight-to the attention of a wealthy individual. By the time he died in 1899, Alger had published around a hundred volumes. Scholar John Geck observes that Alger's themes have been transformed in modern America from their original meanings into a male Cinderella myth and are an Americanization of the traditional Jack tales. Each story has its clever hero, its "fairy godmother", and obstacles and hindrances to the hero's rise. "However", he writes, "the true Americanization of this fairy tale occurs in its subversion of this claiming of nobility; rather, the Alger hero achieves the American Dream in its nascent form, he gains a position of middle-class respectability that promises to lead wherever his motivation may take him". The reader may speculate what Cinderella achieved as Queen and what an Alger hero attained once his middle-class status was stabilized, and "[i]t is this commonality that xes Horatio Alger rmly in the ranks of modern adaptors of the Cinderella myth".
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