I doubt in all seriousness if there was an American writer … who was so widely known and widely read by the boys of the time … For one who read Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” or “Tom Sawyer,” there were ten thousand who read Standish’s “Frank Merriwell’s Dilemma,” or “Frank Merriwell at Yale.” For one who read Thomas Nelson Page, or Judge Shute, or, for that matter, Horatio Alger, Oliver Optic, or Edward S.
Standish,” paid high tribute to Merriwell’s creator: Writing years later in the American Mercury, the noted drama critic (A.B., Cornell, 1904), who knew Patten only by his Tip Top Weekly by-line, “Burt L. Many of the more than nine hundred Merriwell stories, it must be recorded sadly, libeled the illustrious university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.įrank Merriwell had an appeal even to the young George Jean Nathan. “You are a cheap cad,” Frank told the overdressed Harvard bully. One of Merriwell’s unforgettable lines went into history: And if you don’t happen to know where Frank went to college, it was Yale. Sports writers, when faced with reporting a last-minute home run in the ninth inning, or a long run down the field in the fourth quarter, often referred to this providential stroke as a “Frank Merriwell finish.” This was in an era when the only football, of course, was college football. Millions now middle-aged or even older will still smile at the memory. In any case, this all-around, all-American boy has been a hero to several living generations of young males. Perhaps Frank and his clean living chums will yet appear on television there has been talk of it. They have appeared on the radio and in the comic strips.
Others carried on the Merriwell stories briefly, and they have had many revivals over the years since. Almost twenty years later, after grinding out a 20,000-word “novel” every week, for a grand total of some 20,000,000 words of pulp-paper biography, Patten put his burden down.
And the most durable.įrank Merriwell made his bow on April 18, 1896, in the first issue of Tip Top Weekly. Certainly his Frank Merriwell was the best known and most revered character of the five-cent weeklies, the cut-rate branch of the dime-novel industry. When he died at nearly seventy-nine, in 1945, Gilbert Patten was hailed as the last of the dime novelists.
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