Burt L. Standish

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.

Biography

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.

Meanwhile, he managed a semi-professional baseball team in 1890–1891 in Camden, Maine before leaving for New York City. But after this season he again mostly worked as an author, working for Norman Munro, and for most of his career for Street & Smith.