Recently, I sat on the grass at a cookout with women in their 70s and 90s. We belong to a philanthropic organization dedicated to the education of women.
“did you grow up reading nancy drew?” I asked the three closest to me.
You are reading: Who wrote the nancy drew books
“oh yeah”, they said almost in unison. they leaned towards me.
“I used to go to the library and check out as many as I could take,” Lynne said. She’s one of the 70-year-olds, which means she was reading Yellowbacked Nancy in the 1960s. She “knew exactly where she was in the series,” she said. “In fact, I’m sure that’s where I learned to love mysteries.”
“I didn’t have my own set,” said Marie, who is closer to 90. “I grew up poor, and I mean poor. I had to borrow them from whoever had them. Nancys from her day were prized first editions: blue with an orange silhouette of the girl detective.
The adventures of Nancy Drew, perhaps the best-known girl detective in children’s literature, spanned decades, but Nancy remained roughly the same age. It may surprise you to learn that Nancy’s basic personality schema was first conceived by Edward Stratemeyer in the 1920s. At this point, you may be trying to remember the author’s name from your reading log. primary school: carolyn sharpe. so who is edward stratemeyer?
By 1929, Stratemeyer was a successful children’s book mogul. He ran a company called The Stratemeyer Syndicate, hiring ghost writers, most of them newspaper reporters, to flesh out ideas he outlined, publishing all of the books under continuous pseudonyms. Each writer signed a contract that assigned all rights to the Syndicate, and promised secrecy about their involvement with the series, which almost no one honored.
In September 1929, this memorandum reached Grosset & dunlap publishers, the longtime partner of the stratemeyer syndicate:
these suggestions are for a new series for girls that borders on the novel. 224 pages, retail fifty cents. I’ve called this line “stella’s strong stories”, but they could also be called “diana drew stories”, “diana dare stories”, “nan nelson stories”, “nan drew stories” or “helen hale stories” . […] stella strong, a sixteen year old girl, is the daughter of a long standing district attorney. he is a widower and often discusses her affairs with stella and the girl was present during many interviews her father had with leading detectives and in the solving of many intricate mysteries. Then, unexpectedly, Stella was plunged into her own mysteries and found herself embroiled in a series of exciting situations. an up-to-date American girl in her prime, bright, intelligent, witty and full of energy.
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disgusting & dunlap jumped at the idea immediately.
Stratemeyer had an author in mind for this new series. Mildred Wirt had answered an ad in the Publisher magazine when he was a student at the University of Iowa. the ad described the union’s work, including pseudonyms, and ended with: “we are especially keen to get our hands on younger writers with fresh ideas in dealing with boys’ and girls’ stories.” When she answered the ad in 1926, Mildred was 21 years old. In the years that followed, she wrote several books for the syndicate, at $125 a manuscript, equivalent to about two months’ salary for a newspaper reporter at the time.
As children, we tend to think that authors are unimaginably older than us. whoever carolyn keine was, i wouldn’t have pictured her as a 24 year old newlywed, but that’s exactly what mildred wirt was when she wrote the secret of the ancient clock, which presented nancy, an edit on nan, suggested by the editor—to the world.
The United States was in the early stages of the Great Depression. nancy got the green light from grosset & dunlap just a few days before the stock market crash, but you wouldn’t know that from reading the books. he drives his roadster and dresses immaculately through the depression and various wars, alluding to them only in the most oblique terms. (In one book, she takes flying lessons and at another point, someone mentions that Ned, her ever-straight-forward, never-serious boyfriend, is in Europe.) If you wanted, you could disappear into the cozy world of River Heights where all the bad things would come to light and Nancy would take care of them. The plots were intentionally kept free of murder and anything too harrowing, as well as anything that could be seen as sexual: Nancy and Ned never kiss. they were meant to be safe for children, but also functioned as an escape from the heavy realities of their cultural moment.
The refusal to address current events made the books timeless up to a point, but it was Nancy who did the heavy lifting. In an article called “Solving the Crime of Modernity: Nancy Drew in 1930,” the author and literary scholar Amy Boesky puts her finger on exactly what a Syndicate character was intended to do. “Above all, the young heroes in Stratemeyer’s books were shown prevailing over evil, setting right the disordered world around them,” she writes. This mission was shared by the Hardy Boys, another very popular Syndicate series. Is it any wonder that children devoured them?
edward stratemeyer did not live to see nancy become a worldwide phenomenon. he died just twelve days after it was first published, leaving his two daughters in a bind. should they sell the business or manage it themselves? depression eventually made the decision for them. Since there were no buyers, Edna Stratemeyer and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams began running the syndicate with the help of their father’s loyal secretary, Harriet Otis Smith, who introduced Nancy’s friends Bess and George to the series. p>
although several people wrote nancy drew books over the years, the two who wrote the most were wirt and harriet adams. They both claimed to be Carolyn Keine over the years, but sometimes I wonder if they really both claimed to be Nancy.
In an article titled “The Strange Case of Nancy Drew,” published in 1964 in The English Journal, the late education professor Arthur Daigon wonders about the undeniable draw of Nancy Drew. By that time, Nancy had been in print for thirty-four years, and was still publishing new adventures. The original series, as most of us know it, ended in 1979 with The Thirteenth Pearl, after 56 entries. “What is the appeal of the juvenile mystery generally and of Nancy Drew specifically?” Daigon asks before attempting to answer his own question:
High school age girls especially delight in the “mysterious.” they faithfully patronize local horror movie screenings and excite each other with the details of last night’s television schedule. They typically begin their childcare careers when they are twelve years old and high school. as a result, they often find themselves alone in strange houses at night, and the pleasure-pain of fear is stimulated.
It’s easy to wonder if Daigon actually talked to any high school age girls before writing this article.
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I told lynne and marie about arthur daigon’s answer to the perplexing question why young women would have wanted to read nancy drew: babysitting alone in dark houses.
“You can tell him it’s silly,” Marie said.
“i liked nancy because she was adventurous,” lynne said. “there is no mystery there.”
As Melanie Rehak, author of Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the women who created her wrote:
[t]he stories themselves are secondary. What we remember is Nancy: her bravery, her style, her generosity and her relentless desire to succeed endure long after the last page has been turned, the villain sent to jail, the trusty car put in the garage. Although almost no one can remember what exactly happened in the hidden staircase or the whispering statue or the search for the lost map, we know exactly what it is that has held our attention for so many years. she remains as much a part of the idea of American childhood as sleepovers, homework, and gum. as an editorial published in the early 1980s asked: “if there is a woman who in her childhood hours did not mold a clay plate, bake an Indian pudding, bind brownies and carry the high notes of the national anthem in school , is there anyone who has never read nancy drew?”I was long past the age of consuming nancy draws like water, drinking two or three in a summer day, when I found rehak’s book in the library and learned about the origins of nancy for the first time. at first i felt betrayed: carolyn keine was not a real person. she had obediently written her name at the top of my book reports, but she never existed. there was no woman who had been inspired to create a character that captured the imagination of millions of girls, following them until they became women. Nancy had just been a way for people to pay their bills.
but even though carolyn keine wasn’t real, wirt and adams were. in many ways, they couldn’t have been more different. Adams came from a wealthy and privileged family. She went to college at Wellesley, after which her father forbade her to take a job, even though she wanted to. she married and had four children. at 38, she took over the union, along with her sister, although she did most of her day-to-day work. Wirt was from a small town in Iowa, the daughter of the town doctor. “I was just born wanting to be myself,” she once said. She was a swimmer as well as a writer, one of the first people to study journalism at the University of Iowa (one of her professors was George Gallup, who created the Gallup poll). she got married and had a daughter, without stopping writing for a moment. Later, she became interested in archeology and obtained her pilot’s license, eventually writing a column for the Toledo Times called “Happy Landings.”
nancy has these two women in her. she has the adams privilege and the money, maybe her friends. she has the freedom and determination to wirt. she has both of her drive for excellence, her tireless work ethic. so as far as i’m concerned, they’re both carolynkeen.
correction: an earlier version of this story said that yellow-backed nancy drawn editions first appeared in the 1950s. they appeared in the 1960s.
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