Gilbert Patten
American writer (1866–1945)

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.
“Gilbert Patten” enters the record as american writer (1866–1945). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gilbert, Patten and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Gilbert Patten” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Gilbert, Patten and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3764201. VIAF identifies the subject as 67827861. The Library of Congress control number is n82228275. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1866, 1945, 1886 and 1892.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gilbert Patten” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.