American author Horatio Alger Jr. is portrayed in a close bust CDV by Black, Photographer, 173 Washington Street, Boston, issued as a subscriber premium by the publisher of The Schoolmate magazine, the reverse bearing the printed identification The author of Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger, Jr. / Presented by the Publisher of the Schoolmate to his subscribers. Alger appears as a young man, facing the camera in a three-quarter pose with a dark coat, white shirt, and black bow tie, his expression serious and his features clean-shaven with dark, neatly combed hair.

The printed reverse designation confirms this card was produced specifically as a promotional portrait distributed with magazine subscriptions, a common practice among American publishers of the 1860s to build reader loyalty through celebrity likenesses. Black's studio at 173 Washington Street, Boston, was among the city's leading photographic establishments and produced portraits of numerous New England literary figures during this period.

Horatio Alger Jr. (1832–1899) was one of the most widely read American authors of the nineteenth century, whose approximately one hundred novels of poor boys rising through honest effort and good fortune shaped the mythology of American social mobility for generations. Ragged Dick (1868), his breakthrough novel, introduced the archetypal Alger hero: a street boy of good character whose virtue, diligence, and lucky encounters with benevolent patrons lift him from poverty to respectability. Though critically dismissed in his own lifetime and largely unread today, Alger's name became permanently synonymous in American culture with the idea of upward mobility through hard work.

The reverse bears the printed publisher's premium designation identifying Alger as the author of Ragged Dick, with the Black studio imprint and dealer code 12/10 / LOCDXZ.