Frank Merriwell's Finish

After nearly a year of adventures at Fardale Academy, Frank Merriwell enters Yale University and finds new challenges to keep him occupied. Some of these challenges are on the athletic field, while others are presented by students jealous of his ability to come out on top against all adversaries. Frank Merriwell's Finish is from his first year at Yale and establishes the pattern that was to follow for decades in what has been called the longest serial in fiction. As the story opens, the Yale freshman baseball team is in a hotly contested game against the freshmen of its traditional rival, Harvard.
Frank Merriwell, one of the most popular characters in the dime-novel era, is the creation of Gilbert Patten (18661945). Merriwell's career is solidly grounded in sports, but he takes time out from winning the big game in order to tour the world, and has many adventures doing so. He was the ideal and idol of American youth. Readers wrote letters to the publishers (subsequently published in the "Applause" column of each issue) to suggest new storylines and to choose sides in debates about which direction the saga should take.
Gilbert Patten is best known for his sporting stories in the Frank Merriwell series, written as Burt L. Standish. Patten started writing the Merriwell stories in April 1896 for the publisher Street & Smith and produced one each week, at a length of twenty thousand words, for twenty years. The series, which appeared in Tip-Top Weekly, was immensely popular, selling some 135,000 copies a week, and the brothers Frank and Dick Merriwell became icons of All-American sportsmanship.

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