Luke Walton sells newspapers in Chicago to help support his widowed mother and younger brother, Bennie. While in Chicago, Luke saves a wealthy old lady and takes his life in his hands when he resolves to confront the man who robbed Luke's father of his wealth and bring him to justice.

Luke Walton is an adventure novel on a young man living in the city of Chicago. Luke is a newspaper boy, whose honesty sometimes borders on the naïve. His father Frederick dies in California where he went to seek a fortune. Apparently he had succeeded and had dispatched his friend, a Mr. Butler to take a large sum of money to Luke and his mother, giving them a description of Butler through a letter. But Butler never shows up. That is, until one day a man matching his exact description buys a newspaper from Luke...

The importance of Chicago in American culture has made the city's place in the American imagination a crucial topic for literary scholars and cultural historians. While databases of bibliographical information on Chicago-centered fiction are available, they are of little use to scholars researching works written before the 1980s. In The Chicago of Fiction: A Resource Guide, James A. Kaser provides detailed synopses for more than 1,200 works of fiction significantly set in Chicago and published between 1852 and 1980. The synopses include plot summaries, names of major characters, and an indication of physical settings. An appendix provides bibliographical information for works dating from 1981 well into the 21st century, while a biographical section provides basic information about the authors, some of whom are obscure and would be difficult to find in other sources. Written to assist researchers in locating works of fiction for analysis, the plot summaries highlight ways in which the works touch on major aspects of social history and cultural studies (i.e., class, ethnicity, gender, immigrant experience, and race). The book is also a useful reader advisory tool for librarians and readers who want to identify materials for leisure reading, particularly since genre, juvenile, and young adult fiction, as well as literary fiction, are included.

With their rakish characters, sensationalist plots, improbable adventures and objectionable language (like swell and golly), dime novels in their heyday were widely considered a threat to the morals of impressionable youth. Roundly criticized by church leaders and educators of the time, these short, quick-moving, pocket-sized publications were also, inevitably, wildly popular with readers of all ages. This work looks at the evolution of the dime novel and at the authors, publishers, illustrators, and subject matter of the genre. Also discussed are related types of children's literature, such as story papers, chapbooks, broadsides, serial books, pulp magazines, comic books and today's paperback books. The author shows how these works reveal much about early American life and thought and how they reflect cultural nationalism through their ideological teachings in personal morality and ethics, humanitarian reform and political thought. Overall, this book is a thoughtful consideration of the dime novel's contribution to the genre of children's literature. Eight appendices provide a wealth of information, offering an annotated bibliography of dime novels and listing series books, story paper periodicals, characters, authors and their pseudonyms, and more. A reference section, index and illustrations are all included.

In Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s most successful book, Alger codified the basic formula he would follow in nearly a hundred subsequent novels for boys: a young hero, inexperienced in the temptations of the city but morally armed to resist them, is unexpectedly forced to earn a livelihood. The hero’s exemplary struggle—to retain his virtue, to clear his name of accusations, and to gain economic independence—was the basis of the Alger plot. Hugely popular at the turn of the twentieth century, Alger’s works have at different times been framed as a model for the “American dream” and as dangerously exciting sensationalism for young readers; Gary Scharnhorst’s new introduction separates the myth of Alger as “success ideologue” from the more complex messages conveyed in his work. Ragged Dick is paired in this edition with Risen from the Ranks, another coming-of-age story of a young man achieving respectability. Historical appendices include extensive contemporary reviews, material on the “success myth” associated with Alger, and parodies of Alger’s work.

Reproduction of the original: The Haunted Mine by Harry Castlemon