NON-FICTION

Alger

ALGER, A BIOGRAPHY WITHOUT A HERO.--Herbert R. Mayes--Macy-Masius ($3-50).

The Man. While Thomas Alva Edison peddled newspapers, Henry Ford polished steam engines, and John Davison Rockefeller was out of a job, Horatio Alger Jr. was writing best sellers for boys. Ragged Dick, Phil the Fiddler, and the heroes of every one of his 119 books survived adversity, invariably achieved fame and fortune at the end of the last chapter. Virtue was always triumphant. Parents who prescribed Alger for their sons, and sons who devoured him with avidity, vied with each other in adulating him for three full decades. His "fan" mail would have done credit to any present-day cinemactor.

Unlike the heroes of his books, he never reached the pinnacle of lasting success to which he always aspired, but like them his life was filled with adversity: Born on Friday the 13th, 1832, he was the oldest child of a Massachusetts Unitarian minister. This duty-bound parent forbade him, a senior at Harvard, to marry, insisted that he go to theological school. Graduated, he encountered Elise at the Paris Morgue. She was supplanted as his mistress by another who pursued him to New York, where he gave her the slip. He escaped the Civil War, by virtue of two successive broken arms and severe pneumonia. He developed fatherly affection for a little Chinese boy, but the child was overtaken by violent death at the hoofs of a runaway horse. He fell in love, and when he found the lady unsympathetic went temporarily mad.

Worn with surfeit of adversity, he took refuge with the man who had befriended him years before. A magazine installment of Ragged Dick, Alger's first long story, had attracted the attention of this Charles O'Connor, superintendent of the Newsboys' Lodging House. He invited Alger ''to use the Newsboys' Lodging House as a source of inspiration." Alger accepted, wrote Fame and Fortune in that lodging, and made it his New York headquarters.

The Significance: An engaging record of the growing pains of native literature during the Civil War era, and a compelling portrait of one of its most pathetic figures. Author Herbert R. Mayes writes with humor, insight, sympathy, economy and uncanny balance. His "biography without a hero," which is confined to 238 pages, should be welcomed by all who (like John Drew, William Wrigley, Gerald Chapman) esteemed Alger, as .well as all who did not (John Erskine, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd).