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WORK TITLE: Frank Merriwell and the fiction of all-American boyhood
WORK NOTES:
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CITY: Laurinburg
STATE: NC
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http://www.uncp.edu/academics/colleges-schools-departments/departments/history/faculty-and-staff * http://www.uncp.edu/news/ryan-anderson-qa-uncp%E2%80%99s-new-undergraduate-research-director * http://uncpbraves.com/coaches.aspx?rc=50 * http://robesonian.com/news/education/80777/uncp-professor-ryan-anderson-publishes-book-on-american-boyhood
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married, wife’s name Kristen; children: Maxwell and Marianne.
EDUCATION:Florida State University, B.Sc., 1997; University of North Carolina Wilmington, M.A., 2000; Purdue University, Ph.D., 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, educator, and writer. University of North Carolina at Pembroke, 2007-, associate professor of history, coordinator of American Studies Program, director of the Pembroke Undergraduate Research and Creativity Center.
AVOCATIONS:
Golf.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Historian Ryan K. Anderson is a native of Fort Smith, Arkansas. He teaches U.S. history and specializes in cultural history. Anderson is also an avid golfer who plays in competitive events. In his first book, Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood: The Progressive Era Creation of the Schoolboy Sport Story, Anderson examines author Gilbert Patten’s fictional creation of Frank Merriwell, whose stories garnered a wide readership from 1896 to 1912, beginning in Street and Smith’s dime novel Tip Top Weekly. Merriwell’s adventures were so popular that even after Patten gave up primary authorship of the stories Street and Smith continued to publish tales about Merriwell until the 1930s, when the cost of mailing the dime novels became too expensive.
The widespread followers of Merriwell’s adventures were called Merry’s Flock. Anderson examines the stories about Merriwell in terms of how the stories remade the view of American boyhood in the twentieth century. Anderson focuses on exploring the interaction among Street and Smith publishing, Patten, and many readers of Merriwell’s adventures. Patten wrote the dime novels as Burt L. Standish, creating serialized 20,000-word entries in the Merriwell saga.
Both Patten and the publishers agreed that Merriwell was to have the many qualities that young Americans should emulate. Merriwell was not vain about his good looks or his athletic prowess. He was talented and also a hard worker. Although girls were attracted to him, he remained essentially chaste. He was also dedicated to social justice. Not only did he inspire other characters, he often led those who had gone astray back onto the right path. The fictional stories about Merriwell became representative of the Progressive Era debate concerning the role of sports and school in turning boys into men.
Viewing the Merriwell novels as a historical artifact, Anderson draws from readings of the text, illustrations, readers’ letters, advertisements, editorial correspondence, memoirs, trade journals, and legal documents. He presents a social and cultural history to show how the fictional character evolved into a character who was used to foster a uniform view of what a normal American boyhood should be like. Furthermore, this image was presented within the context of a supposedly accepted hierarchy of class, gender, and race. “Nonwhite characters primarily served as comic relief or to accentuate the superiority of the story’s star,” wrote Sport in American History website contributor Russ Crawford.
Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood is split up into two parts. The first part provides an historical context and begins with an account of Patten’s early life and career, followed by a discussion of the origins and history of Street and Smith publishers. In the book’s second part, Anderson examines the Merriwell saga and how the stories played a role in changing the idea and ideals of American boyhood. In doing so, Anderson focuses on four separate, multiyear story arcs that defined thd Merriwell saga over time. The first arc follows Merriwell from boyhood through his graduation from Yale University and entry into the world as a man. The second arc examines a love triangle involving Merriwell and the women Inza Burrage and Elsie Bellwood. Inza represented the new woman, whereas Elsie was a Victorian lady. The third arc involved Merriwell’s discovery that he had a long-lost half brother named Dick, who was redeemed via the efforts of Merriwell. The final arc focused on Merriwell’s founding of the Merriwell American School of Athletic Development for boys.
Anderson points out that despite having long story arcs that lasted over several years or more, the publishers and Patten made sure that each installment included a self-contained story that could also be read as an overarching tale that revolved around a certain theme. Sport in American History website contributor Crawford wrote: “Anderson might have dug deeper in his analysis of the treatment of those who exhibited differences from the majority culture.” He went on to remark: “Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood is a good read,” also calling it “well researched.” Writing for Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Publishers, R.C. Cottrell referred to the book as “a welcome addition to the literature on popular culture.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Publishers, June, 2016. R.C. Cottrell, review of Frank Merrill and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood: The Progressive Era Creation of the Schoolboy Sport Story, p. 1474.
ONLINE
Robesonian Online, http://robesonian.com/ (October 14, 2015), Scott Bigelow, “UNCP Professor Ryan Anderson Publishes Book on American Boyhood.”
Sport in American History, https://ussporthistory.com/ (July 2, 2016), Russ Crawford, review of Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood.
University of North Carolina at Pembroke Web site, http://www.uncp.edu/ (August 12, 2014), “Ryan Anderson: Q&A with UNCP’s New Undergraduate Research Director”; (April 24, 2017), author faculty profile.
Ryan Anderson
Associate Professor, Coordinator of American Studies Program, Director of the Pembroke Undergraduate Research and Creativity Center
(Ph.D., Purdue University)
Email: ryan.anderson@uncp.edu
Phone: 910.775.4263
Office: Dial Humanities Building, Room 208
Office Hours: MW 1:00 PM-2:00 PM; & by appt.
Courses Offered
AST 2010 - Introduction to American Studies
HST 1010 - American Civilizations to 1877
HST 1020 - American Civilizations since 1877
HST 3140 - Gilded Age and Progressive Era
HST 3150 - War, Prosperity, and Depression, 1912-1945
HST 3820 - Growing Up American
HST 4100 - Themes in U.S. Social History
HSTS 4241 - History of Rock and Roll
HSTS 5430 - US Social and Cultural History: Manliness in America
RYAN ANDERSON: Q&A with UNCP’s new undergraduate research Director
August 12, 2014
Ryan AndersonRyan Anderson’s enthusiasm for student research at UNC Pembroke is infectious. In a conversation this summer, he recalled the undergraduate research project that turned his career around. He would like to help more UNCP students have that eye-opening experience.
Dr. Anderson has been appointed interim director for the Pembroke Undergraduate Research and Creativity Center (PURC). The center’s mission is to promote high-impact, faculty-guided research.
PURC is a clearinghouse for student research. The center’s keystone event is the annual symposium, where student research of all kinds is displayed for the entire campus.
The center annually distributes approximately $40,000 in three types of grants, ranging from $500 – 1,700. The grants are for students to: 1) travel to do research and to attend conferences and events; 2) research materials; and 3) research assistantships.
A member of the History Department, Dr. Anderson is well equipped to guide undergraduate research and creative activities. He is engaged in scholarly research for a forthcoming book and has been a member of the PURC Council for seven years and has been active in all its programs.
This summer, Dr. Anderson was bouncing back and forth between two offices in preparation for the new school year. He took time out to talk about the program.
Question: Nearly every faculty member has a story about how research transformed their education and professional life. Was there such a moment for you?
Answer: For me, it began with an undergraduate experience. I was working on a degree in social science education with the goal of teaching high school and coaching baseball. I signed up for a research seminar that I did not have to take, but it proved fun. What excited me was the creative process of finding a story that others have not told. I wrote a paper researching the historical origins of the Native American Church as a response to federal policies towards American Indians in the late nineteenth century.
That was when I decided to go to graduate school, and that experience helped me get into graduate school.
Question: You have participated in all of PURC’s programs almost since its inception. As the interim director, do you have any new goals?
Answer: The first thing is to get settled into our new location in Wellons Hall (Suite F). With more space, I would like the center to be a hub, a meeting place, a comfortable place for students. It should be a functioning workspace for students, with access to computers. Another goal is to work with the Literacy Commons to publish some of the best of the PURC Symposium. My other goals are to continue the good things that are already happening at PURC, including maintaining a high level of involvement in the symposium; getting more faculty involved in mentoring student research; encouraging more diversity of the research projects; and I’d like to give away more grant money. Grant applications are becoming quite competitive.
Question: Should every student at UNCP be able to engage in this kind of high-impact research?
Answer: Research is an integral part of a university education, and PURC opens up opportunities for advance research. Research is eye opening, and a majority of our students would benefit from some exposure to serious research or creative endeavor. It’s been like a snowball rolling down hill. There is a burgeoning core of students doing great work who are selling other students on the value of research – that it can be enjoyable as well as valuable.
Question: You mentioned “diversity” of research. Tell us more about that?
Answer: One of the things we’ve done well is to provide interdisciplinary space. The PURC Council is made up of faculty from across campus. We’ve demonstrated that all of the disciplines produce excellent scholarship. We’ve been fortunate to have live performances in music and theatre at the symposium. There is a good balance between the sciences, social sciences and humanities.
Question: Do you have some favorite research projects?
Answer: I get excited about a lot of projects. I enjoyed the live performances by the Jazz Combo and a theatre performance. We gave a grant to a student who wrote a play so he could stage it. We sponsored a student-scientist this summer who is studying in Alaska for six weeks and another at Bangor Univeristy in Wales, UK. Adam Walls mentored a student who created a moving sculpture for a project titled “Mythical creature: fabric, leather and metal sculpture.” That was genius. I was inspired by several students of (English professor) Susan Cannata’s, who wrote about Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games.” I have an academic interest in media created for young people, so after seeing the student’s work, I read the entire trilogy. I was also intrigued by a science project on fire ants and how to control them. They are an invasive species that I have in my yard. It was very useful.
Question: What does a vigorous undergraduate research culture say about a university?
Answer: It’s what distinguishes us. It says that our faculty are dedicated teacher-scholars. It says our students are engaged in learning that is transformative. There is more to do if we are to make UNCP what Chancellor (Kyle) Carter refers to as an “institution of choice,” but building undergraduate research opportunities can contribute greatly to that goal. For students, research is what sets them apart from the crowd, whether it’s for graduate and professional school or a job application. Research gives students an opportunity to go above and beyond what goes on in the classroom. It gives them the freedom to explore their own ideas.
* * *
Dr. Ryan Anderson teaches U.S. History and specializes in cultural history. His book, “Merry’s Flock and the Creation of All-American Boyhood,” will be published by the University of Arkansas Press. For more information about the PURC Center, please contact the office at (910) 775-4263 or email purc@uncp.edu. Visit PURC online at:
2015-16 Golf Coaching Staff
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Ryan Anderson
Dr. Ryan Anderson
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Dr. Ryan Anderson enters his sixth season during the 2015-16 academic year as a faculty associate working with the UNCP golf squad. His primary roles with the program include organizing seminars on topics related to success off the links, occasionally attending practice and matches and serving as an informal mentor and advisor.
A native of Fort Smith, Ark., Anderson joined the UNCP History Department in 2007. He teaches courses on American History since 1877, including those focused on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Interwar America, childhood and youth, rock n’ roll, and masculinity. Anderson has won the Student Athlete Advisory Committee’s (SAAC) recognition as a “Most Valuable Professor” five times (2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015) and his faculty peers named him a recipient of a UNCP “Outstanding Teaching Award” (2010) during his first year of eligibility.
He is also the director of the Pembroke Undergraduate Research Center and the author of numerous articles and reviews; his first book, Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood (University of Arkansas Press) was released in 2015. He graduated from Florida State in 1997 with a bachelor's of science degree in social science education before earning a master's of arts degree in U.S. History from UNC Wilmington in 2000 and a Ph.D. in U.S. History from Purdue University in 2006.
An avid golfer who enjoys playing in local and CGA events, Anderson resides in Laurinburg with his wife Kristen, son, Maxwell and daughter, Marianne.
UNCP professor Ryan Anderson publishes book on American boyhood
Education
Scott Bigelow
Ryan Anderson
Courtesy photo | Ryan Anderson, an associate professor of history at UNCP, focused on Frank Merriwell for his book. Merriwell was a fictional character who was athletically, academically and socially gifted. The character’s creator wrote story lines to follow Merriwell through his journey to becoming a smart, athletic and popular man. Anderson’s book studies different ideas of “manly boyhood,” including that of Merriwell’s.
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PEMBROKE — Ryan Anderson, an associate professor of history at The University of North Carolina at Pembroke, has recently published a book examining the journey from boy to man.
In the early 20th century, a cross-section of American society attempted to answer that question by helping define Frank Merriwell, the fictional all-American lad, as the picture of a manly boy, according to Anderson.
Anderson’s new book, “Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood: The Progressive Era Creations of the Schoolboy Sports Story,” takes readers back to dime novels of the Progressive Era to examine how both children and adults changed how a generation of Americans thought men were made.
Merriwell was a schoolboy athlete who excelled academically and socially, and the creation of author Gilbert Patten. Patten, who wrote under the name of Burt L. Standish, penned more than 800 stories that appeared as serials in weekly paper form and were republished in paperback and cloth-bound books.
Published in “Tip Top Weekly” by Street and Smith, what became known as the Merriwell saga portrayed its protagonist’s evolution into a smart, athletic, upright and popular man — everything a boy aspired to be.
“The Frank Merriwell story appeals to a wide audience even today,” Anderson said. “This book has appeal to readers interested in gender studies, sports, business and book history. Dime novel collectors are also interested in the series.”
Merriwell was so widely read that his story permeated American language into the 1960s, Anderson points out. “Sportswriters in the 1960s would describe a last-second win as a ‘Merriwell finish,’” Anderson said. “He helped define an entire generation of boys who grew up with him, and he informed a generation how to raise a boy.”
“This was a time that being born to a good family was no longer considered a guarantee that a boy would become good man,” Anderson said. “There was now a science of raising boys — boyology.”
For a growing and aspiring middle class, Frank Merriwell offered opportunity to climb the social and economic ladder despite his blue-blood Yale letter sweater.
Turn-of-the-century America was changing with urbanization and industrialization, and a boy’s life was changing too, Anderson said.
“Adolescence was a relatively new idea at this time,” he said. “Youth were being given more time to grow up and were expected to follow an increasingly regimented path to adulthood — part of this story is the creation of that path.”
Anderson, the historian, departs from Merriwell scholars from literary fields, saying the key to Merriwell’s success was willpower. Anderson was also challenged to become America’s preeminent Merriwell scholar. He chased the story coast to coast through many libraries.
“I not only spent a lot of time reading ‘Tip Top,’ but I chased down the papers of early dime novel collectors who corresponded with Patten and other authors, as well as reading through years of business records and editorial correspondence. All of that research made it possible for me to treat ‘Tip Top’ as a cultural artifact and decode how it embodied the debate over manly boyhood.”
Anderson is the director of the Pembroke Undergraduate Research and Creativity Center and coordinates the American Studies minor. He is a historian of American culture and teaches courses like the History of Rock and Roll, Manliness in America, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Interway America and Growing Up American, among others. For information on the book, contact Anderson at 910-775-4263 or by email at ryan.andeson@uncp.edu.
Scott Bigelow is the public information officer for The University of North Carolina at Pembroke.
Anderson, Ryan K.: Frank Merriwell and the fiction of all-American boyhood: the Progressive Era creation of the schoolboy sports story
R.C. Cottrell
53.10 (June 2016): p1474.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Anderson, Ryan K. Frank Merriwell and the fiction of all-American boyhood: the Progressive Era creation of the schoolboy sports story. Arkansas, 2015. 293p bibl index afp ISBN 9781557286826 cloth, $27.95; ISBN 9781610755719 ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-4270
PS169
MARC
Anderson (history/American studies, Univ. of North Carolina, Pembroke) presents a biographical treatment of Gilbert Patten (1866-1945), who employed the pseudonym Burt L. Standish for his Frank Merriwell series. The ambitious author, who first became renowned during the Gilded Age and flourished during the Progressive Era, crafted formulaic representations of the all-American boy. His seemingly average protagonist was hardly that, as he moved from boyhood to adulthood while excelling in sports, the classroom, romantic endeavors, and life altogether. Delivered in serialized fashion, the tale of Frank Merriwell initially appeared in Tip Top Weekly, a Street & Smith publication that appeared from 1896-1912. Anderson argues that the fictional Merriwell recast American boyhood and at the same time popularized the schoolboy sports tale. He stood for an appropriately "manly" figure, excelling in competition, hard work, fair play, and acceptance of authority. Anderson concludes on a more negative note, suggesting that the Merriwell image interferes with contemporary Americans' understanding of themselves today. A welcome addition to the literature on popular culture. Summing Up: ** Recommended. All readers.--R. C. Cottrell, California State University, Chico
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cottrell, R.C. "Anderson, Ryan K.: Frank Merriwell and the fiction of all-American boyhood: the Progressive Era creation of the schoolboy sports story." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1474. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942681&it=r&asid=4b56eee120aaec1dcbe32969f2e2668f. Accessed 25 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942681
Review of Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood
lindsaypieper / 02 July 2016
Anderson, Ryan K. Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood: The Progressive Era Creation of the Schoolboy Sports Story. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2015. Pp. xxiv+220. Notes, photos, images, appendix, and index. $27.95 paper.
Reviewed by Russ Crawford
Merriwell Cover
The University of Arkansas Press, 2015.
My first review for Sport in American History was of a book about the career of Clair Bee, the coach and author who wrote stories about Chip Hilton, the last of the fictional schoolboy athletes. In Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood, historian Ryan Anderson turns the clock back to explore the literary life of Frank Merriwell, the fictional model upon which characters such as Hilton were constructed. Merriwell was a physical and moral exemplar who used sport to successfully negotiate the transition between boyhood and manly adulthood. Gilbert Patten, who used the name Burt L. Standish, wrote more than one hundred and forty Merriwell stories for Street and Smith, his publishers, between 1896 and 1912. Even after he relinquished primary authorship, Street and Smith, with occasional input from Patten, kept Merriwell alive in various forms until the 1930s. Along the way, the writer and publisher created a new genre in boy’s fiction that sought to teach their readers how to develop willpower in order to become “manly” men.
In contemporary times, the term “manly” is more likely to be used ironically, but in turn-of-the-century America, with concerns emanating from Muscular Christianity that American boys were growing up soft, the word and concept carried a great deal of social importance. In addition, many feared that industrialization was robbing men of their individuality. As Anderson points out, Americans were concerned with raising boys to be men who could exercise their willpower, which could help boys overcome humble beginnings to become significant adults (p. 3-4). “Boyologists,” a contemporary term for men such as Patten, who could teach boys to exercise willpower and how to demonstrate that they had “sand,” were much in demand during the time. According to Anderson, the idea of sand was an analogy that came from the railroad world – when a train was stuck on ice, applying sand would give it the traction to move in the desired direction. The term can also be a substitute for having guts, grit, cojones, or the like. However the terms might be translated, social thinkers were vitally concerned that the youth of America grow up with the ability to keep themselves and their nation strong.
Given the title, the reader might be surprised that Merriwell is not the primary focus of the work. Indeed, Anderson spends relatively little time considering the adventures of the hero. Instead he intertwines his story, along with a biography of Patten, within a history of Street and Smith, and the history of the dime novel publishing around the turn of the century, within the general background of the Progressive Era.
We do meet Merriwell in the introduction, and learn that he was a young man that generally lived the straight and narrow life, but was not above pulling pranks if the spirit moved him. He was an athlete without rival, along with being a moral exemplar who lived by a strict ethical code. This was precisely the example that boyologists wanted youth to emulate, and what Ormond Smith, the head of Patten’s publishing firm, wanted from his author.
Patten
William G. Patten, Courtesy of the University of Oklahoma Press.
The first chapter introduces Patten, the author, and places him in the context of the late nineteenth century publishing world. Patten himself was a difficult adolescent, and ran away from home as a teenager to find work. When he returned home, he began his writing career while working for newspapers, and began selling a few Western novels, despite never having been to the West. Unlike most of his peers, he married young, to what turned out to be the first of three wives. With a family, including his parents, to support, Patten began to alternate between New Jersey and New York City, where the writing jobs were located. He started making some money as a free-lance writer, and ironically decided that he wanted to avoid writing for the youth market. Fate intervened, of course, and he entered into a contractual relationship with Street and Smith to write stories aimed at adolescents. A talented writer, who could turn out 12,000 words per week on a regular basis, Patten was a poor businessman. He never negotiated significant raises, even after he became a star for the publishing house, and also failed to secure any royalties for his voluminous body of work. He made Street and Smith one of the top publishing houses in the country, and Merriwell one of the most widely read youth characters of the time, but eventually he died nearly penniless.
Street and Smith was a publishing Colossus at the time, and their rise under Ormond Smith and his brother George is the focus of the second chapter. Anderson devotes the bulk of the chapter to describing the state of the dime novel business in the late nineteenth century, and to Street and Smith’s place in that world. The house made good use of U.S. postal law, which, at the time, treated dime novels the same as pulp fiction for mailing rates. The Smith brothers worked well together, with Ormond handling the creative side and George running the business side. Ormond was the motivating force behind the creation of Frank Merriwell, and in Patten, he found the man who could bring the hero to life. He hired Patten to create a character who would be a “distinctly American” boy who could move copies of Tip Top Weekly, and along the way, maybe teach boys to be men (p. 25).
Merriwell Pic
Frank Merriwell at Yale, Courtesy of Wikia.
The various story arcs are the subject of chapter three, and finally the reader who is looking for an in-depth discussion of Merriwell is rewarded. When read in succession, the various adventures that the hero undertook, in addition to his college escapades, makes one wonder how the serial publication could remain so popular for so long. There is suspension of belief for fictional purposes, but Merriwell pushed that envelop so far as to render it unrecognizable as a letter conveyance. When he wasn’t scoring runs or touchdowns, he was finding lost mines, or saving damsels in distress from wild animals, or sometimes wilder men. Quite rightly, readers often doubted if they could live up to his example, at least athletically. What everyone hoped they could do, of course, was live up to the moral example that the plucky hero set.
There were two damsels in particular that Merriwell spent a great deal of time rescuing. Though he met and briefly pursued, or was pursued by other young ladies, Inza Burrage and Elsie Bellwood were the primary objects of his affection. When Ormond Smith proposed the series, he indicated that the hero might have love interests, but that was not essential to the storyline. Chapter four argues that Merriwell’s search for a mate worthy of him began to become a primary concern of the series’ readers. In an innovation for the industry, the publishing house actively sought reader’s opinions, through the “Applause” section at the back of the book, and often acted upon their suggestions. Anderson indicates that fan interest in the love triangle Patten created foreshadowed the more contemporary debates over Team Edward or Team Jacob spawned by the Twilight movies. Burrage was written as a “new woman,” who exercised her own willpower, while Bellwood was described as being more of the traditional style of woman. Patten and Smith milked the storyline for all it was worth, seemingly indicating that Bellwood would win the hero, then switching to Burrage, and even throwing wildcards into the mix every now and again. Anderson indicates that some of the indecision might have been a consequence of Patten’s own romantic tribulations. In the end, however, (spoiler alert) Merriwell chose the more modern Burrage as his wife. According to Patten, the impetus for Merriwell’s choice of Burrage came largely from reader opinion voiced on the Applause page. “I got so many letter from readers favoring Inza that I had to have him marry her . . . [T]hey seemed to like a girl who went out and did things . . . rather than the clinging vine type” (p. 133). Here might have been a place where Anderson could have speculated on how this preference for modern women played into the flapper and new woman era of the 1920s, when the readers of the turn of the century became adults.
The final two chapters deal with the effort to keep the story fresh by introducing Frank Merriwell’s long lost brother, Dick, and finally his son Frank, Jr., who was often known as Chip. These additions were not completely successful, but the straw that broke Merriwell’s back was not reader, nor author fatigue, rather U.S. Postal policy that reclassified dime novels as being subject to more expensive postage rates. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the court in Smith v. Hitchcock (1912), declared that dime novels did not qualify to be considered the same as pulp magazines for postage purposes, and the decision spelled the end for the business model that had made Street and Smith so successful for decades. Patten himself was reaching a crisis. Even before the court decided against his publisher, he was having health problems and was withdrawing from the stories. For the remainder of his career, before his death in 1945, he tried his hand at more adult fiction, but returned to Merriwell when he needed money. While attempting to star his own publishing house late in life, he was taken in by a confidence man and was destitute during his final years.
In various places, Anderson explores Merriwell’s interaction with not only the opposite sex, but also with those on the outside of white middle class culture. Toots, an African American was written as a caricature of what white Americans expected of blacks at the time. Faring only slightly better was the Native American character John Swiftwing, who was written more sympathetically, but Patten’s story lines involving him made it clear that none of his race could ever measure up to the majority culture. Nonwhite characters primarily served as comic relief or to accentuate the superiority of the story’s star. One area where Anderson might have dug deeper in his analysis of the treatment of those who exhibited differences from the majority culture, was when he discussed an oppositional group at Yale known as the “Chickering set.” They were described as “sissies,” and in general, Patten wrote that “Nature made a mistake in giving them a chance to wear trousers” (p. 95). The author was careful to always describe Merriwell as firmly heterosexual, and brushing lightly over the Pickering set’s hinted-at orientations could have been explored more fully.
Another question that would have been interesting to hear about from Anderson is what the actual Yale thought about their fictional favorite son. Anderson does discuss the college story genre, which Patten and Merriwell democratized, but has nothing on the relationship between the university and the character, if there was one. A search of the current Yale website turns up several links to pages with Merriwell mentions, but one wonders if there was a Merriwell effect similar to the Flutie effect of more modern times. Of course, in those times, a university education was largely for the children of the affluent, so recruiting likely wasn’t the concern that it is now. Anderson does, however, make the point that the series had a side effect of convincing more youth that a college education was a worthwhile goal.
Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood is a good read. Well researched, and illustrated with images of many of the covers from the original dime novels, and it also contains an appendix with the various works, aside from his Merriwell stories, that Patten wrote for Street and Smith. Part of the fun of reading this, in common with many histories, is that one learns that there is not much new under the sun. In addition to readers splitting into team Inza and team Elsie, we also learn that readers of the Merriwell series also wrote their own fan fiction, including alternative novels, and even plays and musicals featuring the hero. Anderson’s description of the late nineteenth century should also give those concerned with contemporary political affairs some relief, since those times raised many of the same concerns that we read about today. For instance, his contention that in the late nineteenth century “The older generation seemed incapable of assuring that good leaders would emerge as people thought they had in the past,” seems to be ripped from today’s headlines (p. 31).
Where the work succeeds best is in describing the popular publishing industry at the turn of the century and beyond. This makes it a great read for those who are interested in the publishing business in general. One fault in the work is that he needed to have included more temporal context. It is often uncertain when a story arc began or ended, or how some events in Patten’ life fit into what was occurring in his character’s evolution. More dates would have been helpful.
Still, even though the reader is not immersed in the titular character until the third chapter, Anderson does a good job of placing him in context of schoolboy heroes, staring with Horatio Alger’s various subjects, and ending with Chip Hilton. Those interested in Frank Merriwell, the fictional athlete, might be somewhat disappointed, as there is very little discussion of his athletic exploits, other than as background, so the sport historian might need to look elsewhere for a more focused treatment. It does, however, serve as a nice background work for anyone interested in sport fiction and it growth.
Russ Crawford is an Associate Professor of History at Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio. His area of specialty is sport history, with an evolving focus on nontraditional practitioners of gridiron football. Along with several chapters on sport history, he has published one book, The Use of Sport to Promote the American Way of Life During the Cold War: Cultural Propaganda, 1946-1963, and has another, Le Football: The History of American Football in France that will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in August of 2016.