Fred Fenton is the Erie train boy, a young lad selling sundries on the trains traveling north from New York and through this work supporting his mother and siblings as the family struggles to survive in a New York tenement house.
Horatio Alger Jr. ; January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American writer, best known for his many young adult novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. (Excerpt from Wikipedia)