Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood
Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood By:"Ryan K. Anderson" Published on 2015-09-25 by University of Arkansas Press Read online or download Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood -"Social Science" 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 boy...