Gilbert Patten
The world’s most published fiction author of his time, William George Patten (later know as Gilbert Patten) was born on October 26, 1866 in Corinna, Maine. He lived there until he was 23. An avid reader of dime novels, he started writing stories as a child. At 18 he wrote and submitted two short stories to Beadle’s Weekly, a widely circulated, newspaper-like publication specializing in fiction. He was paid $6 for the stories when they were published in 1885 and was taken on as a regular contributor. [4]
As an adult Patten used the first name Gilbert among other pen names. He wrote many short stories and dime novels for the Beadle and Adams company and other publishing houses. By 1895 he was paid an average of $100 per novel. Dime novels were immensely popular with young people. They were published weekly and sold in candy stores, newsstands, and cigar stores all over the United States. [7]
In 1895, at the suggestion of his publisher, Patten began writing dime novels under the pen name Burt L. Standish about the adventures of a young man, Frank Merriwell, at boarding school. Patten produced a book a week for over 17 years, writing over 856 weekly novels that sold from 135,000 to 200,000 copies a week. [3]
For decades youngsters lined up, coins in hand, to purchase the latest Frank Merriwell adventure. In addition to the Merriwell series Patten wrote 70 complete novels and an untold number of stories. [2] Patten ended his dime novel career in 1913 but the weekly novels were collected into 208 paperback books that remained in print until the 1930’s [1]. By that time over 500 million copies of the Merriwell novels and his many other works had been printed making him one of the most popular fiction writers of his time. [2] Some of these books are still available in Kindle and used print editions on Amazon.
In this series of articles I will look briefly at the life of this remarkable, and once famous writer, especially his early life in Corinna. The material is based on a number of references listed on THIS PAGE. The numbers in square brackets refer to the these sources listed at the end. Some are scholarly works, some are magazine articles and original documents on web sites. The most important reference is Mr. Patten’s autobiography, written some time before his death in 1945. The manuscript of the book was unknown until it was discovered in 1959 and later published by his family in 1964. In the first one hundred pages of the book he describes growing up in Corinna. A copy of the book, Frank Merriwell’s Father, An Autobiography by Gilbert Patten (Burt L. Standish), [7] is available at the Stewart Free Library in Corinna. A limited number of copies are available for purchase on Amazon. Unless otherwise noted most of the information in these sections came from the autobiography.