Frank Merriwell At Yale Again And Again And Again (June 1961 | Volume: 12, Issue: 4)

Frank Merriwell At Yale Again And Again And Again

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Authors: Stewart H. Holbrook

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June 1961 | Volume 12, Issue 4

When he died at nearly seventy-nine, in 1945, Gilbert Patten was hailed as the last of the dime novelists. Perhaps he was indeed the last. Certainly his Frank Merriwell was the best known and most revered character of the five-cent weeklies, the cut-rate branch of the dime-novel industry. And the most durable.

Frank Merriwell made his bow on April 18, 1896, in the first issue of Tip Top Weekly . Almost twenty years later, after grinding out a 20,000-word “novel” every week, for a grand total of some 20,000,000 words of pulp-paper biography, Patten put his burden down. Others carried on the Merriwell stories briefly, and they have had many revivals over the years since. They have appeared on the radio and in the comic strips. Perhaps Frank and his clean living chums will yet appear on television; there has been talk of it. In any case, this all-around, all-American boy has been a hero to several living generations of young males. Millions now middle-aged or even older will still smile at the memory.

Sports writers, when faced with reporting a last-minute home run in the ninth inning, or a long run down the field in the fourth quarter, often referred to this providential stroke as a “Frank Merriwell finish.” This was in an era when the only football, of course, was college football. And if you don’t happen to know where Frank went to college, it was Yale. One of Merriwell’s unforgettable lines went into history:


“You are a cheap cad,” Frank told the overdressed Harvard bully.

Many of the more than nine hundred Merriwell stories, it must be recorded sadly, libeled the illustrious university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Frank Merriwell had an appeal even to the young George Jean Nathan. Writing years later in the American Mercury , the noted drama critic (A.B., Cornell, 1904), who knew Patten only by his Tip Top Weekly by-line, “Burt L. Standish,” paid high tribute to Merriwell’s creator:


I doubt in all seriousness if there was an American writer … who was so widely known and widely read by the boys of the time … For one who read Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” or “Tom Sawyer,” there were ten thousand who read Standish’s “Frank Merriwell’s Dilemma,” or “Frank Merriwell at Yale.” For one who read Thomas Nelson Page, or Judge Shute, or, for that matter, Horatio Alger, Oliver Optic, or Edward S. Ellis—there were five hundred who weekly followed the exploits of Standish’s magnificent Frank … His influence on American young men was vastly greater than any of these …

My own juvenile experience fitted into this lowbrow bracket. Worse, so far as tradition in my native New England was concerned, I failed to find the sacred Youth’s Companion of much interest, save to yearn for the premiums offered for Hew subscriptions, which