Burt L. Standish

Burt L. Standish was the best-known pen name of Gilbert Patten (1866–1945), an American writer from Corinna, Maine. Beginning in 1896 in Street and Smith's Tip Top Weekly, he wrote the adventures of Frank Merriwell, the clean-living Yale athlete who wins every game and forgives every enemy, at the rate of a twenty-thousand-word story a week for seventeen years, nearly a thousand in all, and the stories were reprinted in books that sold in the hundreds of millions. He also wrote westerns and other boys' series as Gilbert Patten and under other names. Merriwell became a byword for the all-American hero.