Now, nineteen years after his death and thirty-four years after Nathan expressed his wish, the autobiography of Burt L. Standish, who was really Gilbert Patten, appears for the first time. The author of the Frank and Dick Merriwell stories had not quite completed his account of himself but it has been possible, from his papers, for Harriet Hinsdale and Tony London to reconstruct the last phase of a long, happy, and exciting life. The result is a book scarcely less absorbing than the purely fictional accounts Gilbert Patten wrote.

Living in a small southern beach town, seventeen-year-old Matty, unsure of his future and beset with parent and girl problems, finds his only successes in playing an out-of-style arcade game.