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]
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
As himself
The Diamond Sport, 1886, 1 story
Violet Vane, 8 stories between 1889 and 1892
The Deadwood Trail, 1 novel published by D. Appleton and Co. in 1904
Football stories in Popular Magazine, a Street & Smith publication (1903)
Cliff Stirling or Clif Sterling, a series of five sporting novels published by David McKay between 1910 and 1916
Jack Lockwill, a 1927-1928 comic strip, different illustrators
The College Life Series
1. Boltwood of Yale (1914)
2. The College Rebel (1914)
3. On College Battlefields (1917)
4. The Call of the Varsity (1920)
5. Sons of Old Eli (1923)
6. Ben Oakman, Stroke (1925)
As Burt L. Standish
NEW Tip Top Weekly: An Ideal Publication For The American Youth
Owen Clancy's Run of Luck or, The Motor Wizard in the Garage (1914)
Frank Merriwell, 209 dime novels between 1896 and 1930 (some between 1927 and 1930 written by other authors with the same pen name), 28 of them reprinted as hard covers
Big League, 16 episodes of baseball stories
The following are the first 143 titles of the Merriwell series (Stories of Frank and Dick Merriwell)
1. Frank Merriwell's School Days By Burt L. Standish
^Associated Press, “Creator of ‘Frank Merriwell’ Dies”, The San Bernardino Daily Sun, San Bernardino, California, Wednesday 17 January 1944, Volume 51, page 1.