Just before his death, Alger claimed to have sold 800,000 books during his years as a writer. After his death, his books sold at one million "per year". More Alger books were sold per year after his death than were sold during the writer's lifetime. Edward Stratemeyer, the head of a company that published a great amount of boys' fiction, adopted Alger's heroic moral stance to his own books for boys. Other writers adjusted Alger's morality and ethics to suit more money-focused times. These revisions remained strong until the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929.