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William George "Gilbert" Patten (October 25, 1866 – January 16, 1945) was a writer of dime novels and is best known as author of the Frank Merriwell stories, with the pen name Burt L. Standish.


Biography


Frank Merriwell's Discovery on the cover of Tip Top Weekly (1900)
Tip Top Films produced the 1910 film Frank Merriwell in Arizona; or, The Mystery of the Mine
Poster for Frank Merriwell in Arizona (1910)

Gilbert Patten was born in Corinna, Maine in 1866. His father, a carpenter, and his mother were deeply religious pacifists. They were Seventh Day Adventists.[1] He entered Corinna Union Academy at fourteen, but when his father threatened that he would be put to work if he did not improve at school, Patten ran away to Biddeford, Maine where he worked in a machine shop. When he returned home and told his father that he would become an author, he was given thirty days to prove himself. He sold his first two stories in this period to the dime novel company of Erastus Flavel Beadle, and combined his resumed studies for the next four years with writing and publishing stories. When he was twenty, he married Alice Gardner, and in 1892 their son Harvan Barr Patten was born. They later divorced and Gilbert Patten would marry twice more.[2]

Patten worked at the Pittsfield Advertiser before creating in 1888 his own newspaper, the Corinna Owl. He sold it the next year to the Advertiser, and devoted his time to the stories, mostly westerns, for Beadle's Half-Dime Library.[2]

Meanwhile, he managed a semi-professional baseball team in 1890–1891 in Camden, Maine before leaving for New York City.[3] But after this season he again mostly worked as an author, working for Norman Munro, and for most of his career for Street & Smith.[4]

He was a writer of dime novels. His first published dime novel was The Diamond Sport; or, The Double Face of Bed Rock, published in 1886 by Beadle.[5] He wrote westerns with the pen name Wyoming Bill,[6] but is best known for his sporting stories in the Frank Merriwell series, written as Burt L. Standish. Patten started writing the Merriwell stories in April 1896 for the publisher Street & Smith and produced one each week, at a length of twenty thousand words, for twenty years. The series, which appeared in Tip-Top Weekly, was immensely popular, selling some 135,000 copies a week, and the brothers Frank and Dick Merriwell became icons of All-American sportsmanship, entering the jargon of sports commentators.[7][8] Patten, however, never received any royalties for them, being paid up to $150 per story as a hack writer. The series was originally inspired by the success of the British Penny Dreadfuls like Jack Harkaway.[9] Gibert Patten also contributed to the Frank Merriwell comic strip from 1928, and supervised the 1934 NBC radio series.[10] In 1893, he hired Edward Stratemeyer as a writer for the Street & Smith publication Good News.[11] From 1927 to 1930, Gilbert Patten would start a new series of Frank Merriwell stories, aided now by a few ghostwriters. In 1930, Patten started his own publication, The Dime Novel, but only one issue appeared.[12] Apart from the Merriwell stories, Patten wrote 75 complete novels and an unknown number of stories. He estimated that he had written 40 million words as an author.[13] In total, some 500 million of his books were in print,[14] making him one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time.

He lived most of his life in Camden, Maine, but moved to California in 1941. He died aged 78 in his sleep at the home of his son H. V. Patten in Vista, California in 1945.[15]


Partial bibliography


Cover of Frank Merriwell's Pursuit, by Burt L. Standish
Cover of Frank Merriwell's Pursuit, by Burt L. Standish

As himself



The College Life Series



As Burt L. Standish


The following are the first 143 titles of the Merriwell series (Stories of Frank and Dick Merriwell)


As William West Wilder, aka Wyoming Bill



As Harry Dangerfield



As Emerson Bell



As Gordon Braddock



As Morgan Scott



As George Thruston Burr



As Bertha M. Clay



Notes


  1. "William G. Patten".
  2. American Heritage Volume 12 #4[permanent dead link]: Frank Merriwell at Yale Again and Again and Again by Stewart Holbrook (June 1961]
  3. Joel Zoss and John Bowman in Diamonds in the Rough: The Untold History of Baseball page 265 (2004)
  4. John T. Dizer, Authors Who Wrote Dime Novels and Series Books, 1890-1914 in Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes, page 81 (1996)
  5. J. Randolph Cox, in The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book page 271 (2000)
  6. John A. Dinan in Sports in the Pulp Magazines page 66 (1998)
  7. Steven Serafin and Alfred Bendixen in The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature page 1072 (2003)
  8. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Allusions page 357
  9. E.M. Sanchez Saavedra in Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes, page 113 (1996)
  10. J. Randolph Cox, in The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book page 172-173 (2000)
  11. John A. Dinan in Sports in the Pulp Magazines page 134 (1998)
  12. J. Randolph Cox, in The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book page 87-88 (2000)
  13. James M. Cain in Sixty Years of Journalism page 157 (1985)
  14. Chester G. Mayo in The New England Quarterly vol. 38 #3 page 422 (1965)
  15. Associated Press, “Creator of ‘Frank Merriwell’ Dies”, The San Bernardino Daily Sun, San Bernardino, California, Wednesday 17 January 1944, Volume 51, page 1.


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