Written shortly after Lehigh University in Bethlehem was chartered, while the stimulation of Packer’s business successes was also conspicuously enhancing the economy of the Lehigh Valley, the biographer concluded that, “The wealth which he has gathered is but a tithe of that which he has been the means of creating in the Lehigh Valley.” Included were so many details about Packer’s life that the account seems likely to have been based on an interview with Packer himself or someone very close to him. The subtitle, Valuable Examples for Every Young Man, reveals the book’s purpose. In a thin, anonymous volume published in 1867, The Rich Men of the World and How they Gained their Wealth, the Packer sketch repeatedly emphasized that he was a self-made man. This sketch was brief and appeared at the very end of the book, with the author’s comment, “I mention these circumstances as an encouragement to our young men, to teach them what may be accomplished by a life of integrity, energy, and devotion to business.” Perhaps the first people to read about Asa Packer were ambitious, aspiring, youthful Americans who did so while riding on his trains. The book, published in Easton by Bixler and Corwin, was essentially a travel guide written because Packer’s brain child, the Lehigh Valley Railroad, had begun to bring thousands of visitors to an area where the scenery was as attractive as the employment opportunities that the new railroad created. Henry’s 1860 History of the Lehigh Valley. The earliest biographical statement describing Asa Packer appeared in Mathew S. By comparing biographical accounts of him written in his own time and the years that followed, it’s fascinating to examine how Packer’s reputation and that of the self-made man have fared during the past century. In his first novel, Ragged Dick, published in 1867, Alger included one character who lectured another, “Remember that your future position depends mainly on yourself, and that it will be as high or low as you choose to make it.” The true-to-life epitome of the self-made image was, for a long time, seen in railroad magnate Asa Packer who, at his death in 1879, was Pennsylvania’s richest man. (1832-1899), became best-sellers because the American public relished his stories about plucky boys achieving their goals against all odds. Several of the most famous such works, novels written by Horatio Alger Jr. Nineteenth-century literature abounds with stories of men who rose from humble circumstances to great wealth by virtue of their own diligence, perseverance, and courage.
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