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Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her
by Melanie Rehak
Product Group: Book
ISBN: 1435275829
EAN: 9781435275829
Dewy Decimal #: 813.52
Library Binding: 364 pages
SKU: 52002*
Condition: As New
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Aplucky "titian-haired" sleuth solved her first mystery in 1930. Eighty million books later, Nancy Drew has survived the Depression, World War II, and the sixties (when she was taken up with a vengeance by women's libbers) to enter the pantheon of American girlhood. As beloved by girls today as she was by their grandmothers, Nancy Drew has both inspired and reflected the changes in her readers' lives. Now, in a narrative with all the vivid energy and page-turning pace of Nancy's adventures, Melanie Rehak solves an enduring literary mystery:
Who created Nancy Drew? And how did she go from pulp heroine to icon?
The brainchild of children's book mogul Edward Stratemeyer, Nancy was brought to life by two women: Mildred Wirt Benson, a pioneering journalist from Iowa, and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, a well-bred wife and mother who took over as CEO after her father died. In a century-spanning story Rehak traces their roles-and Nancy's-in forging the modern American woman. With ebullience, wit, and a wealth of little-known source material, Rehak celebrates our unstoppable girl detective.
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Customer Reviews
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Carolyn Keene lives!
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-11-10
Good-natured true-mystery history of the men and women responsible for the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series of juvenile fiction.
The "Stratemeyer Syndicate" was a group of ghostwriters who created the kids books based on titles and detailed outlines prepared by Edward Stratemeyer, for anywhere from $85 to $150 per book! This system lasted for over 40 years, until the small-town 19th century economics and the cult of Carolyn Keene meant the ending of the syndicate system. The main role of Carolyn Keene was then taken over by Harriet Adams, Stratemeyer's daughter, who had taken over the company upon his death, and kept it going and healthy into the 70s.
Poignantly enough, as Adams grew older, and her family aged and some passed away, she took on the persona of Keene and adopted Nancy Drew as her own--even though Mildred Wirt Benson, the ghostwriter responsible for the early classics was still very much alive and very indignant about the slight.
Still, all ends well as Nancy Drew lives on in the 21st century.
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Sleuthing the sleuth
Rating (4)
Date: 2008-09-29
This is a good biography and a nice overview of the publishing world of Nancy Drew and pulpdom at large. Gives great peeks behind the scenes into the creation of this most popular girl sleuth phenomenon. Goes hand in glove with The Secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate.
Handles a mountain of information quite well. Does not bog down and is a fun read.
Melanie Rehak did a fantastic job. My mother would have loved this book as she was a lifelong Drew (and Bobbsey Twins, etc.) fan and introduced Nancy and the Harby Boys to me as a child. Glad to see more studies like this appearing.
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The 50% Nancy Drew Solution
Rating  (2)
Date: 2008-06-02
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
For the feminist historian looking for a book length essay on Nancy Drew's influence on Betty Friedan, this book is a must read. For the casual fan of the world's greatest girl detective and anyone interested in the prolific Stratemeyer Syndicate roughly half of this book will be interesting. Unfortunately the history of Miss Drew and the heavy handed feminist rhetoric are intertwined in alternate pages and sometimes alternate sentences. Fans of Nancy rather than Betty will probably find themselves scanning through pages of social commentary looking for the next mention of their heroine.
Those who preserve will be rewarded with the story of Nancy's two literary mothers and an inside look at the declining years of the greatest children's book mill ever created. Unfortunately, the story of Edward Stratemeyer and his struggles to become the king of the juvenile serial are glossed over in the rush to get to his invention of Nancy Drew which came very late in his life.
In the final analysis, this book is a worthwhile read however those peering over the fence from outside the author's world view will find the reading dry and often tangential.
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Slow-Paced but worth reading
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-05-17
This is a well-researched account of the Nancy Drew book series. The writing style is dry along the order of a graduate thesis. The larger print of the book makes for slower reading since it's hard to breeze along. It is not until after the first hundred pages that the author gets to the story of Nancy Drew. Along the way, there are long side trips depicting the woman's movement. In fact for a while I thought I was reading the history of the women's movement in the USA instead of the account of the Nancy Drew books. However, the reader does finally learn how the books came to be written and how the series was continued. After a slow beginning, I did enjoy reading this account.
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How it all happened
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-12-21
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
If you had asked me, when I was twelve years old, who I wanted to be when I grew up, I wouldn't have hesitated an instant.
"I want to be Carolyn Keene!" I would have said. "I want to write Nancy Drew mysteries!"
So you can imagine my surprise and delight when I picked up the phone one day in the mid-1980s and heard the question, like an echo of a nearly-forgotten dream, "Would you like to be Carolyn Keene?"
Would I like to be Carolyn Keene? Would I like to win the lottery, hang the moon, be queen for a day or a lifetime? Or as Nancy would say, "Now, that's the silliest question I've ever heard!" Of course I would love to be Carolyn Keene! I felt as if the universe had suddenly opened up and smiled straight down at me. I was about to join the magical, mystical, mysterious team of writers who created the most famous Girl Detective of all time. I was going to be Carolyn Keene!
As a result of that phone call, I wrote five Nancys and a pair of Hardy Boys, working alone or with my husband, Bill Albert. And as a result of that apprenticeship, I went on to be a writer of many other mysteries, a profession and a vocation that I am still happily pursuing twenty years later.
So it was as Carolyn Keene that I happily opened Melanie Rehak's biography of Nancy, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, and Mildred Wirt Benson--and I wasn't disappointed. Rehak's book begins with the first chapter of Nancy's adventures, with the story of Edward Stratemeyer, boy literary wizard and his remarkable children's book syndicate, which got underway with the Rover Boys (1895), carried on with the Bobbsey Twins (1904), and produced the Hardy Boys (1927) and Nancy Drew (1930). Stratemeyer produced the concept, the plot outline, and the publishing contract (much of his work was published by Grosset & Dunlap), and hired out the writing to nameless authors who did the actual work for a flat rate of around $125, under a series pseudonym: Franklin W. Dixon for the Hardy Boys, Carolyn Keene for the Nancy Drew series.
Stratemeyer died just twelve days after Nancy's launch, and his daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, took over the Syndicate. Harriet, who graduated from Wellesley and married a stockbroker, had been raised to enjoy life as a well-to-do socialite. She didn't find it easy to take over Stratemeyer's desk, for (believing that women's place was in the home) her father had kept all of his business dealings separate from the home he made for his now-ailing wife and two daughters. What's more, Harriet had young children at home, and had to juggle her work with her family and social obligations. She had a lot to learn, but learn she did, and under her direction, the Syndicate not only stayed afloat but prospered, even through the dark days of the Depression.
But it wasn't just Harriet that kept the Syndicate from going under; a young writer named Mildred Augustine Wirt (later Benson) played a major role in its survival and success. Mildred was a small-town Iowa girl with one compelling passion: "I . . . wanted to be a writer from the time I could walk. I had no other thought except that I would write." Her motto was "Thou shalt not quit." She didn't, either. Aiming for a career as a writer in a time when the words women, career, and writer were rarely spoken in the same sentence, she graduated from the University of Iowa's School of Journalism at the age of 20, got her master's two years later, and the next year, 1926, landed a job with Stratemeyer's Syndicate.
It is to Mildred Wirt that Nancy owes her original feistiness, pluck, and never-say-die determination, for Mildred wrote 23 of the first 30 Nancys: Books 1-7, 11-25, and 30. She would have written more, but when Harriet reduced the writers' pay to $85 a book, Mildred quit, and Walter Karig filled in the gap. Mildred returned for a second stint, then left for good in 1952. After that, Harriet assumed full responsibility for the series. She rewrote many of the earlier books and herself wrote most of the later ones, making Nancy into a rather different character, more tentative, more polite, a little less sure of herself. Harriet later testified: "I felt that she [Nancy, as Mildred had written her] was too bossy, too positive. . . she spoke to people too sharply" (Girl Sleuth, p. 296).
Mildred Wirt also recognized the conflict: "There was a beginning conflict in what is Nancy . . . Mrs. [Harriet Stratemeyer] Adams was an entirely different person; she was more cultured and she was more refined. I was probably a rough and tumble newspaper person who had to earn a living, and I was out in the world. That was my type of Nancy. Nancy was making her way in life and trying to compete and have fun" (Girl Sleuth, p. 297).
None of this came out until the spring of 1980 (a scant five years before my incarnation as Carolyn Keene), when Harriet Adams tried to accept a lucrative offer from Simon & Schuster to publish all future books in the Stratemeyer list. Grosset & Dunlap sued, and the ensuing trial made clear to the public what the Syndicate had tried for years to conceal: that Harriet Stratemeyer had not written all the Nancys (as she claimed); that Mildred Wirt (who like the rest of the writers in the Stratemeyer stable had signed a pledge not to reveal her authorship) had had the most enduring influence over the shaping of the character; and that if anybody was going to wear the title of the "real" Carolyn Keene, it ought to be Mildred.
Melanie Rehak's book is a fascinating study of the cooperation and conflict between the two women who shaped the most famous Girl Detective in the world--and who, in turn, shaped many of us. Speaking for myself, as a young reader I much preferred Mildred's Nancy to Harriet's, for I was growing up in a rough and tumble world where I (no socialite) knew I would have to make a living and compete: Nancy--self-assertive, self-confident, self-reliant Nancy--showed me how to do that. And speaking for myself as a writer, both as Carolyn Keene and as the author of my own three mystery series, I have to say that it would have been a lot harder to learn what I had to learn about making mysteries if it hadn't been for Nancy the indomitable, for never-say-die Mildred, and for Harriet, who saved the Syndicate and kept it going through the dark times.
Thank you, Nancy, Mildred, and Harriet, for making it all happen. And thank you, Melanie Rehak, for telling us their story.
by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women
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