Frank Merriwell's First Job, Or, At the Foot of the Ladder, Classics To Go
Excerpt: "Biff—thump! “Oh, what a soaker!” “Go at him, Rattleton!” “Don’t let him knock you up against the door like that.” Biff! biff!—thump! “There you go again!” “Oh, jose your claw—I mean close your jaw!” panted Harry Rattleton, as he ducked and escaped a left-hand swing from Frank Merriwell, with whom he was boxing in the room of the latter at Yale. “You fellows are not in this!” “You’re not in it, either,” lazily laughed Bruce Browning, who was half sitting, half reclining on the couch, watching the boxing bout and smoking a pipe at the same time. “Well, you weren’t such a much when you got up against Merriwell that time you tried to do him,” snapped Rattleton, backing out as Frank slowly followed him up. “That’s ancient history,” declared the big fellow. “But Merriwell found me a pretty warm baby!” “Get up and try him now!” cried Harry. “I’ll bet he’ll bang you all over the room before you touch him.” “Thanks!” grinned Bruce. “I’ve quit the ring. I’m not looking for pugilistic glory any more.” “Stand up to him, Rattleton,” advised Diamond. “You do too much running away.” “Oh, you know!” flung back Rattleton. “You’ve had your turn, too, and you wasn’t so good.” “You can’t do anything with him if you don’t try to hit him,” said Bart Hodge, who was sitting astride a chair in the corner. “More thanks! If you’ll put the gloves on, I’ll guarantee you will not hit him any oftener than I have. I believe he gave you a dose of medicine once on a time. I’m the only fellow in the room who hasn’t been punched in earnest by him. You chaps are good talkers, but—— No you don’t.” Then he went under Frank’s arm like a cat, giving Merry a sharp jab in the ribs."
Burt L. Standish
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. 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. 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. 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. Meanwhile, he managed a semi-professional baseball team in 1890-1891 in Camden, Maine before leaving for New York City. But after this season he again mostly worked as an author, working for Norman Munro, and for most of his career for Street & Smith. 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. He wrote westerns with the pen name Wyoming Bill, 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. 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. Gibert Patten also contributed to the Frank Merriwell comic strip from 1928, and supervised the 1934 NBC radio series. In 1893, he hired Edward Stratemeyer as a writer for the Street & Smith publication Good News. 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. 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. In total, some 500 million of his books were in print, 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.
