William Patten, editor
Editor biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
William Patten lived from 1868 to 1936. He was an American editor, and he was managing editor of the Harvard Classics, the fifty-volume series assembled under Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, which set out to put a liberal education on an ordinary household's shelf.
He is not the author of the stories in our volume, and we will not pretend otherwise. He is the man who chose them.
Why the book exists
The Junior Classics was conceived as the young person's counterpart to the Harvard Classics: ten volumes, published by P.F. Collier, with an introduction by Eliot and a reading guide by William Allan Neilson of Harvard. The set appeared in 1912 and again in a 1918 edition.
Heroes and Heroines of Chivalry is Volume Four. Patten went through the great stories of honor and courage, from Arthur and Launcelot to Robin Hood and Don Quixote, and decided which belonged together in one book and in what order.
The book we publish, and why
We publish Heroes and Heroines of Chivalry in hardcover.
The choosing is the work, and it is why the book holds. A reader gets the best of an entire tradition in one volume without having to hunt it down across a dozen sources, several of them unreadable in their original form. Patten also wrote the preface, which explains what a boy's training for knighthood actually involved, and it is the most useful few pages in the book.
We name him on this page deliberately. Editorial judgment is a craft, it is usually invisible, and the person who did it ordinarily goes unnamed. That is a trade we know something about, and we would rather credit it.
How to read it
It is an anthology, so read it out of order without guilt. The Arthurian material runs as a sequence and is best taken in sequence; everything else stands alone.
Suits reading aloud from about seven and independent reading from about nine. The individual stories come from many hands and the difficulty varies between them, so a child may manage one piece easily and stall on the next. That is the anthology, not the child.
The question worth asking is the editor's own: why these stories and not others. An older child who can say what the pieces have in common has understood something about how books are made, not just about knights.
Pair it with
- Howard Pyle, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, for the same tradition told at length by one man with one vision, rather than gathered from many.
- Andrew Lang, The Story of Joan of Arc, for a real life measured against the code these stories describe.
- The Junior Genius Method, our approach of Read, Notice, Write, Recite, Remember, Question, Apply, which suits an anthology particularly well because each piece is a complete unit.
His work as editor
- The Harvard Classics, fifty volumes, as managing editor under Charles W. Eliot.
- The Junior Classics, ten volumes, P.F. Collier, 1912 and 1918. Volume 1 Fairy and Wonder Tales; Volume 2 Folk Tales and Myths; Volume 3 Tales from Greece and Rome; Volume 4 Heroes and Heroines of Chivalry; Volume 5 Stories That Never Grow Old; Volume 6 Old-Fashioned Tales; Volume 7 Stories of Courage and Heroism; and three further volumes.
- International Short Stories, P.F. Collier, around 1910.
Biographical material on Patten himself is thin, which is the ordinary fate of editors. Where we do not know something, we have left it out rather than guessed.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions edited by William Patten