American drama critic George Jean Nathan once expressed a hope in a “Suggestion for a Biography” for The American Mercury: “A book I should like to read—and doubtless there are thousands of ex-youngsters of the 1800’s and early 1890’s who have the same feeling about it as I have—would be a biography, or better still an autobiography, if he is still living, of the man known as Burt Standish, author of the famous Frank Merriwell literature. Who was this Standish; whence came he; what was his history?”
Now, nineteen years after his death and thirty-four years after Nathan expressed his wish, the autobiography of Burt L. Standish, who was really Gilbert Patten, appears for the first time. The author of the Frank and Dick Merriwell stories had not quite completed his account of himself but it has been possible, from his papers, for Harriet Hinsdale and Tony London to reconstruct the last phase of a long, happy, and exciting life. The result is a book scarcely less absorbing than the purely fictional accounts Gilbert Patten wrote.
The Merriwell books, from their inception in 1896 to today, have sold more than 500,000,000 copies. With their success, Patten (or Burt L. Standish) became the real king of the dime and half-dime novelists. His heroes remain today among the best-remembered figures of an age of derring-do.
