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...