Gilbert Patten was born in
Corinna, Maine in 1866. His father, a carpenter, and his mother were deeply religious
pacifists. They were
Seventh Day Adventists. He entered
Corinna Union Academy at fourteen, but when his father threatened that he would be put to work if he did not improve at school, Patten ran away to
Biddeford, Maine where he worked in a machine shop. When he returned home and told his father that he would become an author, he was given thirty days to prove himself. He sold his first two stories in this period to the dime novel company of
Erastus Flavel Beadle, and combined his resumed studies for the next four years with writing and publishing stories. When he was twenty, he married his schoolmate Alice Gardner on 25 October 1886. Their son Harvan Barr Patten was born in 1892. They divorced in 1898 and Gilbert Patten remarried to Mary Nunn of Baltimore (1900-1916) and he married a third time to Carol Kramer in 1918 until her death in 1938. Patten worked at the
Pittsfield Advertiser before creating in 1888 his own newspaper, the
Corinna Owl. He sold it the next year to the
Advertiser, and devoted his time to the stories, mostly
westerns, for Beadle's
Half-Dime Library. But after this season he again mostly worked as an author, working for
Norman Munro, and for most of his career for
Street & Smith. He was a writer of dime novels. His first published dime novel was
The Diamond Sport; or, The Double Face of Bed Rock, published in 1886 by Beadle. He wrote westerns with the pen name Wyoming Bill, but is best known for his sporting stories in the
Frank Merriwell series, written as Burt L. Standish. Patten started writing the
Merriwell stories in April 1896 for the publisher
Street & Smith and produced one each week, at a length of twenty thousand words, for twenty years. The series, which appeared in
Tip-Top Weekly, was immensely popular, selling some 135,000 copies a week, and the brothers Frank and Dick Merriwell became icons of All-American sportsmanship, entering the jargon of sports commentators. Patten, however, never received any royalties for them, being paid up to $150 per story as a hack writer. The series was originally inspired by the success of the British
Penny Dreadfuls like
Jack Harkaway. Gibert Patten also contributed to the
Frank Merriwell comic strip from 1928, and supervised the 1934
NBC radio series. In 1893, he hired
Edward Stratemeyer as a writer for the Street & Smith publication
Good News. From 1927 to 1930, Gilbert Patten would start a new series of
Frank Merriwell stories, aided now by a few ghostwriters. In 1930, Patten started his own publication,
The Dime Novel, but only one issue appeared. Apart from the
Merriwell stories, Patten wrote 75 complete novels and an unknown number of stories. He estimated that he had written 40 million words as an author. In total, some 500 million of his books were in print, making him one of the
best-selling fiction authors of all time. He lived most of his life in
Camden, Maine, but moved to California in 1941. He died aged 78 in his sleep at the home of his son H. V. Patten in
Vista, California in 1945. ==Partial bibliography==