Frank Reade was the protagonist of a series of dime novels published primarily for boys.[1][2] The first novel, Frank Reade and His Steam Man of the Plains, an imitation of Edward Ellis's The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), was written by Harry Enton and serialized in the Frank Tousey juvenile magazine Boys of New York, February 28 through April 24, 1876.[3] The four Frank Reade stories concerned adventures with the character's inventions, various robot-like mechanisms powered by steam.
A very long series of juvenile novels followed which featured the son of Frank Reade, Frank Reade Jr., as its teenaged inventor-hero. These stories were written by Luis P. Senarens (1865–1939) with the pseudonym Noname. Extremely popular during their time, they were often reprinted and new stories have been created as recently as 2011, in the pulp short story collection, Wildthyme in Purple. They were first serialized in Boys of New York, then the individual novels were collected in the Franke Reade Library series that followed. Some were later reprinted in Wide Awake Library.
His inventions included airships of the dirigible-balloon and helicopter type,[4] submersibles, steam-driven and electrical land vehicles, and steam- and electric-powered robots.
The Frank Reade stories are perhaps the best known of the many boys' invention fiction series published in America during the later 19th century. Frank Reade Jr. has appeared as an older man in Alan Moore's Nemo: Heart of Ice, and the Reade family as a whole has also been featured in Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett's Frank Reade: Adventures in the Age of Invention.
Examples
Frank Reade and His Steam Man of the Plains; Or, The Terror of the West (1876)
Frank Reade and His Steam Horse (1876)
Frank Reade and His Steam Team (1876)
Frank Reade and His Steam Tally-Ho (1876)
#20 Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder (1882/1893)
#22 Frank Reade, Jr., and His Electric Boat (1882/1893)
#26 Frank Reade Jr., and His Air-Ship (1883-84/1893)
#34 Across the Continent on Wings; Or, Frank Reade Jr.'s Greatest Flight (1885/1893)
#44 Frank Reade, Jr., and His Queen Clipper of the Clouds (1893)
#53 From Pole to Pole; Or, Frank Reade, Jr.'s Strange Submarine Voyage (1890/1893)
#58 Frank Reade, Jr., and His Electric Coach; Or, The Search for the Isle of the Diamonds (1890/1893)
Pulp magazines were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955. The term "pulp" derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century.
The dime novel is a form of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S. popular fiction issued in series of inexpensive paperbound editions. The term dime novel has been used as a catchall term for several different but related forms, referring to story papers, five- and ten-cent weeklies, "thick book" reprints, and sometimes early pulp magazines. The term was used as a title as late as 1940, in the short-lived pulp magazine Western Dime Novels. In the modern age, the term dime novel has been used to refer to quickly written, lurid potboilers, usually as a pejorative to describe a sensationalized but superficial literary work.
Edward L. Stratemeyer was an American publisher, writer of children's fiction, and founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. He was one of the most prolific writers in the world, producing in excess of 1,300 books himself, selling in excess of 500 million copies. He also created many well-known fictional book series for juveniles, including The Rover Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew series, many of which sold millions of copies and remain in publication. On Stratemeyer's legacy, Fortune wrote: "As oil had its Rockefeller, literature had its Stratemeyer."
Penny dreadfuls were cheap popular serial literature produced during the 19th century in the United Kingdom. The pejorative term is roughly interchangeable with penny horrible, penny awful, and penny blood. The term typically referred to a story published in weekly parts of 8 to 16 pages, each costing one penny. The subject matter of these stories was typically sensational, focusing on the exploits of detectives, criminals, or supernatural entities. First published in the 1830s, penny dreadfuls featured characters such as Sweeney Todd, Dick Turpin, Varney the Vampire, and Spring-heeled Jack.
Edisonade is a genre of fictional stories about a brilliant young inventor and his inventions, many of which would now be classified as science fiction. This subgenre started in the Victorian and Edwardian eras and had its apex of popularity during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Other related terms for fiction of this type include scientific romances. The term was introduced in 1993 by John Clute in his and Peter Nicholls' The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. It is an eponym, named after famous inventor Thomas Edison, formed in the same way the term "Robinsonade" was formed from Robinson Crusoe.
A story paper is a periodical publication similar to a literary magazine, but featuring illustrations and text stories, and aimed towards children and teenagers. Also known in Britain as "boys' weeklies", story papers were phenomenally popular before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Percy Francis Westerman was an English author of children's literature, with a prolific output. Many of his books are adventure stories with military and naval themes.
Frank Merriwell is a fictional character appearing in a series of novels and short stories by Gilbert Patten, who wrote under the pseudonym Burt L. Standish. The character appeared in over 300 dime novels between 1896 and 1930, numerous radio dramas in 1934 and again from 1946 through 1949, a comic strip from 1928 through 1936, a comic book Frank Merriwell At Yale, and a 12-chapter serialized film in 1936. The book series was relaunched in 1965, but only three books were published.
Erastus Flavel Beadle was an American printer and pioneer in publishing pulp fiction.
Edward Sylvester Ellis was an American author.
The Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward S. Ellis was the first U.S. science fiction dime novel and archetype of the Frank Reade series. It is one of the earliest examples of the so-called "Edisonade" genre. Ellis was a prolific 19th-century author best known as a historian and biographer and a source of early heroic frontier tales in the style of James Fenimore Cooper. This novel may be inspired by the steam powered invention of Zadoc Dederick. The original novel was reissued six times from 1868 to 1904. A copy of the first 1868 printing with its cover intact is owned by the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia.
Jack Wright was the hero of a popular series of Victorian science fiction dime novels and story papers written by Luis Senarens, the so-called "American Jules Verne". A few stories are also credited to Francis W. Doughty. Jack appeared in original stories from in 1891 to 1896 in 120 novels. He first appeared in The Boys' Star Library No. 216, July 18, 1891, "Jack Wright, the Boy Inventor; or, Hunting for a Sunken Treasure".
George Manville Fenn was a prolific English novelist, journalist, editor and educationalist. Many of his novels were written with young adults in mind. His final book was his biography of a fellow writer for juveniles, George Alfred Henty.
Luis Philip Senarens was an American dime novel writer specializing in science fiction, once called "the American Jules Verne".
Charles Austin Fosdick, better known by his nom de plumeHarry Castlemon, was a prolific writer of juvenile stories and novels, intended mainly for boys. He was born in Randolph, New York, and received a high school diploma from Central High School in Buffalo, New York. He served in the Union Navy from 1862 to 1865, during the American Civil War, acting as the receiver and superintendent of coal for the Mississippi River Squadron. Fosdick had begun to write as a teenager, and drew on his experiences serving in the Navy in such early novels as Frank on a Gunboat (1864) and Frank on the Lower Mississippi (1867). He soon became the most-read author for boys in the post-Civil War era, the golden age of children's literature.
Joseph Allan Elphinstone Dunn, best known as J. Allan Dunn, was one of the high-producing writers of the American pulp magazines. He published well over a thousand stories, novels, and serials from 1914 to 1941. He first made a name for himself in Adventure. At the request of Adventure editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, Dunn wrote Barehanded Castaways, a novel about people trapped on a desert island which was intended to avoid the usual cliches of such stories. Barehanded Castaways was serialised in 1921 and was well received by Adventure's readers. Well over half of his output appeared in Street & Smith pulps, including People's, Complete Story Magazine, and Wild West Weekly. Dunn wrote over a thousand stories. He wrote approximately 470 stories for Wild West Weekly alone. His main genres were adventure and western; although he did write a number of detective stories, most of them appearing in Detective Fiction Weekly and Dime Detective. Dunn wrote The Treasure of Atlantis, a science fiction story about survivals from Atlantis living in the Brazilian jungle. The Treasure of Atlantis was published in All-Around Magazine in 1916 and later reprinted in 1970. He was a specialist in South Sea stories, and pirate stories. He also published a lot of juvenile fiction; including many stories for Boys' Life, primarily in the 1920s. A number of his novel-length stories were reprinted in hardbound, some under the pen name "Joseph Montague" for Street & Smith's Chelsea House imprint; many of his books were issued in the United Kingdom. His stories were frequently syndicated in newspapers, both in America and around the world, making him, for a time, a very widely known author.
St George Henry Rathborne, who also wrote as Harrison Adams and many other names, was an American author of boys' stories and dime novels. He is believed to have produced over 330 volumes of fiction in the course of a 60-year career. He had a proclivity for and skill in producing outdoor adventure stories, and his best works fall within that category.
Frank Tousey (1853–1902) was among the top five publishers of dime novels in the late 19th-century and early 20th-century. Based in New York, his sensationalism drew a large audience of youth, hungry for scenes of daring and tormented heroes and damsels in distress. Of particular notice in his approach to the 'blood and thunder' genre were the vivid cover illustrations of his dime novels, which were consistently larger and more thrilling than previous publications. Although focused on fictional weeklies, Tousey managed a variety of materials over time, including some handbooks, gossip sheets, and even a newspaper on current events in the Spanish–American War.
A. L. Burt was a US book publishing house from 1883 until 1937. It was founded by Albert Levi Burt, a 40-year-old from Massachusetts who had come to recognize the demand for inexpensive reference works while working as a traveling salesman. The company began by reprinting home reference works and reprints of popular and classic fiction, before expanding into the field of children's works, particularly series books.
Electric Bob is a fictional science fiction dime novel character created by Robert T. Toombs. In the strips, Electric Bob's real name is Robert Morse and he is depicted as a descendant of a telegraph inventor named Samuel. He appears in a series of five novels in New York Five Cent Library published by Street & Smith. The character Electric Bob was a 10-year-old engineering genius and wealthy from inheritance. He is in the mold of boy inventors Frank Reade and Jack Wright, although not nearly as popular. The author's name is believed to be a pseudonym and little is known about who was behind the strip.
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