Gilbert Patten
William’s friend, Alice Gardner, had become interested in romance novels and stories like those found in Godey’s Magazine. She encouraged him to write a love story. His attempt at romance, a story he called “The Little Widow”, was divided into five chapters of about four thousand words each. The story was rejected by the first magazine he sent it to. On his second attempt the story was published but the attempt to sell it failed. The New Age newspaper in Augusta, Maine accepted and published the story as a “gift”. William received no pay for the work. At that point he decided he was not cut out to write romance.
His ambition was to write literary masterpieces of the type he admired by some of the famous authors he read. But he gave up on that goal to write stories he felt would sell in the dime novel market.
In 1885, just before he turned nineteen years old, William had new determination to write stories that would sell. He wrote “The Pride of Sandy Flats” [6] and “A Bad Man” [5] and submitted them to the Beadle and Adam’s dime novel department using the name William G. Patten. After a while a letter came stating that the two stories were accepted for publication in the story paper Beadle’s Weekly. The letter included a check for six dollars. His father was impressed. While still skeptical Bill decided that maybe he could support William’s ambition to write for a living. [3]
The stories were published in 1885. If you would like to see them in original published form, scanned copies of those issues of Beadle’s Weekly are available online as downloadable PDF files at the links noted in the REFERENCES [5] and [6].
His relationship with Alice Gardner deepened. She became important to his writing. William was prone to spelling and grammatical errors and his penmanship was poor. Alice edited his work, corrected the mistakes and copied the text over in her precise and careful handwriting.
William’s farther was in ill health and not working. Feeling the need to earn some money to help support his parents he dusted off a western story he had started before running away to Biddeford. He rewrote and completed the story producing a dime novel totaling about 33,000 words. He called it “The Diamond Sport” or “The Double Face of Bed-Rock”. Beadle and Adams published the novel in 1886 and paid him fifty dollars. This spurred him on. Publishers began to recognize his talent. For the next novel he received seventy-five dollars. After that he was paid one-hundred and fifty dollars for longer stories. William’s writing career became a reality.
