Jed is fourteen years old, locked in a Pennsylvania poorhouse, and trapped under the thumb of Mr. and Mrs. Fogson, whose cruelty is matched only by their pettiness. The Fogsons see the children in their care as nothing more than mouths to feed and bodies to exploit. But Jed has something they cannot break: a fierce belief that he deserves something better. When he stands up to their tyranny, he's cast out with nothing but the clothes on his back. What follows is a boy's desperate scramble through a world that assumes poverty is a moral failing. Alger, the architect of the American rags-to-riches dream, wrote this novel in 1899 when the gap between the deserving poor and the comfortable classes felt like a chasm that only virtue could bridge. The story crackles with Jed's defiance, his resourcefulness, and the quiet hope that somewhere, somehow, an honest boy can find his place in the sun. It's a product of its time, yes, but the hunger it describes never went away.
