(Excerpt from The Boy From the West
Not a sound came from...)
Excerpt from The Boy From the West
Not a sound came from the boy's lips; but he ran) forward at a loping gait that seemed dreadfully slow, but was really very deceptive, and crossed the track in front of the express.
He was barely in time to grasp the horse by the bit, and then came a most astonishing display of strength and skill, for he stopped the animal within a space less than twelve feet.
As it was, he had not another foot to spare for, as he set the creature back on its haunches and whirled it aside, the first car of the flying train brushed his shoul der and he was enveloped in a whirlwind of dust and sand.
With a grip of iron, the strange lad held the horse steady until the last car flashed along, and then, when the danger was past, he calmly drawled.
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BURT L. STANDISH Ultimate Collection: 24 Action Thrillers in One Volume (Illustrated): Frank Merriwell at Yale, All in the Game, The Fugitive Professor, ... Trail, The Tragedy of the Ocean Tramp…
(This carefully edited collection of adventure & mystery n...)
This carefully edited collection of adventure & mystery novels has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Table of Contents: William George "Gilbert" Patten (1866-1945) was a writer of adventure novels, better known by his pen name Burt L. Standish. Patten used many other pseudonyms and wrote westerns and science-fiction novels, but he is most famous for his sporting stories in the Merriwell series with brothers Frank and Dick Merriwell, who became icons of All-American sportsmanship. Apart from the Merriwell stories, Patten wrote 75 complete novels and an unknown number of stories. In total, some 500 million of his books were in print, making him one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time. Table of Contents: The Merriwell Series: 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) Other Novels: Owen Clancy's Happy Trail (The Motor Wizard in California) Lefty Locke, Pitcher-Manager
FRANK & DICK MERRIWELL – Ultimate Crime & Mystery Collection: 20+ Books in One Volume (Illustrated): All in the Game, Dick Merriwell's Trap, Frank Merriwell ... Pranks, Lively Times in the Orient…
(Frank and Dick Merriwell main protagonists of the famous ...)
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)
Burt L. Standish (Gilbert Patten): Complete Works: (Fourteen Books, Author's Detailed Biography and illustrations included)
(This kindle edition is Fourteen books collection written ...)
This kindle edition is Fourteen books collection written by Burt L. Standish.
Works Included:
Frank Merriwell At Yale
Frank Merriwell Down South
Frank Merriwell's Bravery
Frank Merriwell's Chums
Frank Merriwell's Cruise
Frank Merriwell's New Comedian
Frank Merriwell's Nobility
Frank Merriwell's Pursuit
Frank Merriwell's Races
Frank Merriwell's Return To Yale
Frank Merriwell's Reward
Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail
Lefty Locke Pitcher-Manager
Owen Clancy's Happy Trail
About Author:
William George "Gilbert" Patten (October 25, 1866 – January 16, 1945) was a writer of dime novels and is best known as author of the Frank Merriwell stories, with the pen name Burt L. Standish.
Gilbert Patten was born on October 25, 1866 in Corinna, Penobscot County, Maine, United States. Christened George William Patten, he was the younger of two children and only son of Cordelia (Simpson) and William Clark Patten. Since his sister died in 1867, he grew up as an only child. His father was a moderately prosperous carpenter of Scotch-Irish descent, and both parents were Seventh-Day Adventists.
Career
Resisting his father's desire that Gilbert Patten follow the carpentry trade and his mother's hope that he would study for the ministry, Patten seasoned his undistinguished school record with a midnight diet of forbidden dime novels and the creation of stories based on his reading. Increasing conflict with his parents caused him to run away, at sixteen, to Biddeford, Maine, where he worked for six months in a machine shop. He returned home determined to make his way in the world, preferably as an author, and soon afterward sold two short stories to the dime-novel publishing firm of Beadle and Adams. Patten now planned to enter college, and at Corinna Union Academy discovered Poe, Hawthorne, Stevenson, and Dickens, whose works seemed "a hundred times more gripping and stirring than any dime novel possibly could be. " To help pay for his education he worked for two summers as a reporter on newspapers in nearby towns, and at nineteen, despite his expanding horizons, he began to turn out dime novels. A revised early work, The Diamond Sport, brought fifty dollars from Beadle and Adams, and he was soon earning as much as $150 a novel.
Marriage brought new responsibilities, and after his father was disabled in an accident Patten had his parents to support as well. Abandoning his dream of college, he committed his total energies to writing cheap thrillers for a mass audience. His wife recopied his hastily written manuscripts, corrected his spelling, and improved his casual grammar. Seeking wider fields, Patten moved in 1891 to New York City. There he produced a series of Westerns for Beadle and Adams under the pseudonym "William West Wilder--Wyoming Will, " only to discover that the Wild West story was giving ground to the urban detective mystery and that the dime novel itself was being replaced by five-cent pulp weeklies. Decreasing fees and increasing expenses, a son, Harvan Barr, was born in 1892, led Patten to leave Beadle and Adams. After a short stint with the six-cent juvenile weekly Golden Hours, he approached the publishing firm of Street and Smith, with whom he served a two-year apprenticeship in miscellaneous juvenile fiction before receiving a commission to create a new series concerning a schoolboy athlete. Patten invented a pseudonym for himself, "Burt L. Standish, " and a name for his hero, "Frank Merriwell, " and in four days wrote a 20, 000-word episode.
The first number, Frank Merriwell: or, First Days at Fardale, appeared in Tip Top Weekly (An Ideal Publication for the American Youth Price, Five Cents) on April 18, 1896, and Frank was launched on his immediately successful and remarkably long-lived career. The alter ego for a shy, clumsy, unathletic, success-hungry Maine boy who never made it to college, Frank Merriwell was devastatingly strong and handsome, impossibly proficient, and stiffly moral. He touched neither alcohol nor tobacco (Patten enjoyed both). Frank's manly contempt for cheap, ungentlemanly cads and overdressed Harvard bullies, his "double-shoot" baseball curve which broke both ways, and his inevitable last-minute triumph to win the game for Fardale or Yale over seemingly insurmountable odds pushed the weekly circulation of Tip Top to over 135, 000 and a prosperity which the author only partially shared. Employed on a piecework basis, Patten wrote a Merriwell story each week for fifty dollars (gradually increased to $150 per week)--an arrangement that lasted for seventeen years and produced more than 800 Merriwell stories. Even Frank Merriwell began to grow stale after seventeen years.
Patten's desperate manipulations of plot, including the invention of a younger brother Dick who followed Frank to Fardale and Yale, and a son, Frank, Jr. ,failed to sustain reader interest, and in 1913 he abandoned the series, though other hands carried it on until 1916. Meanwhile Patten (who by this time was calling himself Gilbert Patten) had turned to the College Life Series and the Big League Series for Street and Smith's new adult sports fiction magazine Top Notch, to juvenile fiction such as the Rex Kingdon Series and the Oakdale Series, and to Western love stories.
In his later years, Patten spent increasingly long periods at "Overocks, " his summer home in Camden, Maine. Gradually he turned away from hack writing. He supervised the revival of Frank Merriwell in a comic strip and a radio program, and worked on a serious novel, an autobiography, and a final, unsuccessful tribute to his hero, Mr. Frank Merriwell (1941). Income from his writing had sharply declined, and after his wife's death in 1938 he suffered a serious breakdown. He moved to California in 1941 to regain his health and to be near his son. Patten died of heart disease at his son's home in Vista, California, at the age of seventy-eight on January 16, 1945. His ashes were placed with those of his wife Carol in New York.
(This kindle edition is Fourteen books collection written ...)
Connections
On October 25, 1886, Gilbert Patten married to Alice Clair Gardner, a Corinna classmate. Patten had been divorced from his first wife in 1898, and in 1900 he married Mary Nunn of Baltimore. This marriage, too, ended in divorce, and on June 27, 1918, Patten wed Carol Kramer of New York City.