Frank and Dick Merriwell main protagonists of the famous series of adventure novels and short stories. The models for all later American juvenile sports fiction, Merriwells excelled at football, baseball, basketball, crew and track at Yale while solving mysteries and righting wrongs. They are half-brothers, but there is a marked difference between them. Frank usually handles challenges on his own while Dick has mysterious friends and skills that help him. William George "Gilbert" Patten (1866-1945) was a writer of adventure novels, better known by his pen name Burt L. Standish. He wrote westerns and science-fiction novels, but he is the most famous for his sporting stories in the Merriwell series. Table of Contents: Frank Merriwell's Limit (Calling a Halt) Frank Merriwell's Chums Frank Merriwell Down South Frank Merriwell's Bravery Frank Merriwell at Yale (Freshman Against Freshman) Frank Merriwell's Races Frank Merriwell's Alarm (Doing His Best) Frank Merriwell's Athletes (The Boys Who Won) Frank Merriwell's Champions (All in the Game) Frank Merriwell's Return to Yale Frank Merriwell's Cruise Frank Merriwell's New Comedian (The Rise of a Star) Frank Merriwell's Reward Frank Merriwell's Backers (The Pride of His Friends) Frank Merriwell's Triumph (The Disappearance of Felicia) Frank Merriwell's Pursuit (How to Win) Frank Merriwell's Son (A Chip off the Old Block) Frank Merriwell's Nobility (The Tragedy of the Ocean Tramp) Frank Merriwell, Junior's Golden Trail (The Fugitive Professor) Dick Merriwell's Trap (The Chap Who Bungled) Dick Merriwell Abroad (The Ban of the Terrible Ten) Dick Merriwell's Pranks (Lively Times in the Orient)

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.

Reproduction of the original.