Dick Merriwell's Heroic Players

Dick Merriwell's Heroic Players

Author: Burt L Standish

Publisher:

Published: 2021-01-19

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13:

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Jim Phillips, industriously making himself a master of certain abstruse problems in mathematics, excited the derision of big Bill Brady, chiefly because it was a warm, lazy spring day, and, therefore, as Bill saw it, entirely out of the question for serious work."It's bad enough to have to go out and do baseball practice," said Jim's big catcher. The two were sophomores, and had won fame as the great Yale battery that had humbled every college team with any pretensions to the championship except Harvard. "But I suppose that if we're going to win that series from the boys in the red socks, we've got to do a little practicing."Phillips himself paid no attention, but Harry Maxwell, his former roommate, who had dropped in for a call, was willing enough to talk.


Frank Merriwell at Yale

Frank Merriwell at Yale

Author: Burt L. Standish

Publisher: Wildside Press LLC

Published: 2008-01-01

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1434462218

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Frank Merriwell was the fictional creation of Gilbert Patten, who wrote under the pseudonym Burt L. Standish. The model for all later American juvenile sports fiction, Merriwell excelled at football, baseball, crew, and track at Yale while solving mysteries and righting wrongs. He played with great strength and received traumatic blows without injury. A biographical entry on Patten noted that Frank Merriwell "had little in common with his creator or his readers." Patten offered some background on his character: "The name was symbolic of the chief characteristics I desired my hero to have. Frank for frankness, merry for a happy disposition, well for health and abounding vitality." Merriwell's classmates observed, "He never drinks. That's how he keeps himself in such fine condition all the time. He will not smoke, either, and he takes his exercise regularly. He is really a remarkable freshie." Merriwell originally appeared in a series of magazine stories starting April 18, 1896 ("Frank Merriwell: or, First Days at Fardale") in Tip Top Weekly, continuing through 1912, and later in dime novels and comic books. Patten would confine himself to a hotel room for a week to write an entire story.


Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood

Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood

Author: Ryan K. Anderson

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

Published: 2015-09-09

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1557286825

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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 boys into men. The saga featured the attractive Merriwell distinguishing between “good” and “bad” girls and focused on his squeaky-clean adventures in physical development and mentorship. By the serial’s conclusion, Merriwell had opened a school for “weak and wayward boys” that made him into a figure who taught readers how to approximate his example. In Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood, Anderson treats Tip Top Weekly as a historical artifact, supplementing his reading of its text, illustrations, reader letters, and advertisements with his use of editorial correspondence, memoirs, trade journals, and legal documents. Anderson blends social and cultural history, with the history of business, gender, and sport, along with a general examination of childhood and youth in this fascinating study of how a fictional character was used to promote a homogeneous “normal” American boyhood rooted in an assumed pecking order of class, race, and gender.


Major Problems in American Sport History

Major Problems in American Sport History

Author: Steven A. Riess

Publisher: Cengage Learning

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780669353808

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Each topic in this text is covered by both secondary readings and a wide variety of primary source documents, including legal decisions, diary entries, newspaper reports, literary accounts, government hearings, and advertisements for athletic equipment.