Patten, Grace Bigelow

Grace Bigelow Patten was the wife of the editor William Patten (1868-1936). Patten was the son of William Swift Patten, a probable relative of the civil engineer, Joseph Gardner Swift (1783-1865), who was the brother-in-law of George Washington Whistler (who, with his second wife, Anna Matilda McNeill, were the parents of the artist James McNeill Whistler). William Patten became an art editor for Harper and Brothers at the age of twenty-three, serving from 1887 to 1890, when he went to Paris to continue his art studies. After returning to the United States, Patten began a long association (1904-1913) with the publishing house P. F. Collier and Son, where he was instrumental in the development and publication of Charles W. Eliot's landmark Harvard Classics series. Patten also edited the Junior Classics series and his wife wrote at least one of the stories ( The Wooden Horse ), which appeared in Tales from Greece and Rome (1912), volume three in the ten-volume set. Grace Bigelow Patten also is known to have published magazine pieces, including A "Bonne-a-toute-faire" (1927), an article for New Outlook . The Patten family resided in New York City for many years, but also maintained a summer home in Rhinebeck, New York, to which the couple moved following Patten's retirement, several years preceding his death in 1936. In 1940, Grace Bigelow Patten donated a collection of 155 manuscript letters by George Washington Whistler, William Henry Swift, Mary McNeill, and others to the New York Public Library.