Gilbert Patten, writing as Burt L. Standish, made a career of generating serialized twenty-thousand-word stories featuring his fictional creation Frank Merriwell, a student athlete at Yale University who inspired others to emulate his example of manly boyhood. Patten and his publisher, Street and Smith, initially had only a general idea about what would constitute Merriwell’s adventures and who would want to read about them when they introduced the hero in the dime novel Tip Top Weekly in 1896, but over the years what took shape was a story line that capitalized on middle-class fears about the insidious influence of modern life on the nation’s boys. Merriwell came to symbolize the Progressive Era debate about how sport and school made boys into men. The saga featured the attractive Merriwell distinguishing between “good” and “bad” girls and focused on his squeaky-clean adventures in physical development and mentorship. By the serial’s conclusion, Merriwell had opened a school for “weak and wayward boys” that made him into a figure who taught readers how to approximate his example. In Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood, Anderson treats Tip Top Weekly as a historical artifact, supplementing his reading of its text, illustrations, reader letters, and advertisements with his use of editorial correspondence, memoirs, trade journals, and legal documents. Anderson blends social and cultural history, with the history of business, gender, and sport, along with a general examination of childhood and youth in this fascinating study of how a fictional character was used to promote a homogeneous “normal” American boyhood rooted in an assumed pecking order of class, race, and gender.

Because he insisted on a certain condition in our agreement. Because he insisted that, after a lapse of time and at the completion of the Mexican railroad, I should accept a third interest in the San Pablo Mine. I fought against it. I told him it was not right. I even threatened to quit and have nothing to do with the work he wished me to perform. He was inexorable, unyielding. I pointed out that my service was not worth what he offered. I showed him that he could get experienced and expert men to do the work for an infinitesimal part of what he proposed to give me. He asserted that he was not giving me this merely for my labor, but on account of past favors and things I had done for him which could not be paid for in money. Even though I did not permit him to force me into consenting to take this share of his mine, I finally remained and did my best. I arrived in Bloomfield three days ago. The day I reached here he placed a paper in my hands. That paper makes me one-third owner of the San Pablo. I'm rich, Elsie. The future is assured for me and for you. That very day I went to the town clerk and had another paper made out. Here it is.”...FROM THE BOOKS.

Reproduction of the original: Frank Merriwell’s Pursuit by Burt L. Standish