Carl Crawford is driven from home by his hostile stepmother who wants her husband's fortune herself and her own son. Driven from Home is a wholesome, honesty-pays, hard-work-triumphs story Alger is known for and is part of a series of rags to riches stories of boys working hard and achieving the American dream of wealth. The stories can be seen as tracing American cultural and social patterns. Horatio Alger, Jr. authored about seventy books. He was the son of a clergyman, graduated from Harvard. His stories are pure, inspiring and as endearing today as they were when first published.