In 1930 a media star was born — an intelligent and lively teenager with a penchant for adventure. Her medium is the girls’ novel and through the Depression, war, the conventional fifties, and the rebellious sixties, and despite competition from movies, comic books, television, and the Internet, not to mention occasional efforts to update her, Nancy Drew has survived essentially unchanged. She’s still the heroine of new mystery stories, the idol of hundreds of thousands of girls and of untold numbers of unconfessed boys.
Melanie Rehak (GRS’94) was among the girls who grew up reading Nancy after bedtime. With parents too savvy for the time-honored flashlight-under-the-covers trick, she pretended to be afraid of the dark and read by the dim light they left on. Three years ago, all grown up and a graduate of the Arts and Sciences Creative Writing Program, she heard a radio obituary of Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson, author of the earliest Nancy Drew books. “Of course Nancy Drew was the first thing I picked up on,” Rehak says. “But she had such a fascinating life otherwise! So I went to the University of Iowa, where she had donated some papers, to see what I could make of it.”
Rehak was enthralled. She began to assemble the story of Nancy and the two women who wrote most of her series under the pen name Carolyn Keene, and in 2005 she observed Nancy’s seventy-fifth birthday by publishing Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her (Harcourt).
Edward Stratemeyer, prolific author of the Rover Boys series and other highly successful children’s books, invented Nancy, against the conventional wisdom that books for girls wouldn’t sell. With more ideas for books than time to write them, he had established the Stratemeyer Syndicate: he devised characters and plot outlines, hired authors, then edited their manuscripts and published them under pseudonyms. To launch Nancy Drew, in 1929 he hired Benson, the first woman to graduate from the University of Iowa master’s program in journalism, a newspaperwoman, and already author of Stratemeyer’s Ruth Fielding mystery series. Ruth, a movie star and director and amateur detective, had made a mistake common to real young career women of the twenties: she got married. Her status as the fictional idol of young girls promptly faltered, her book sales dropped, and her series ended.
Nancy makes no such mistake. She lives, in fact, in a world free of ordinary pressures. As Rehak points out, her mother, who might have urged her to stay home and out of trouble, is long dead; her father has absolute faith in her judgment and the means to provide her with a nimble little car, a modish wardrobe, and servants to attend to all household responsibilities. The boyfriend she eventually acquires is obligingly unobtrusive: he escorts her to college dances and polite little picnics, runs the occasional errand, and consistently fails to dissuade her from taking chances. A high school graduate with no need for employment and no apparent thought of college, Nancy is free to solve the mysteries that, book after book, come her way. In her magical world, there is no Depression or war, no changes in women ’s roles, and only fleeting hints of changing mores.
The syndicate, however, lived in the real world. As the first three Nancy Drew novels were being written, the stock market fell; Stratemeyer died twelve days after they were published. The company was surviving, soon buoyed by the sale of the Drew books, nearly as untouched by economics as Nancy herself, but no buyer was found. Stratemeyer’s elder daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, a sheltered Wellesley girl whose father had finally allowed her to take a job — as long as it was with him — began running the family business, with some help but more carping from her sister.
Women In A Man’s World
Rehak ’s own sleuthing took her from Benson’s papers at the University of Iowa to the Stratemeyer papers at the New York Public Library and Adams’s papers at Wellesley. Her book is about three independent women: Nancy and her two primary authors, both career women in a man’s world.
They worked hard. In 1937, for example, Benson wrote eleven books, not all for the syndicate, and gave birth to a daughter and for many years scrambled to support her and an invalid husband. Adams, also a working mother, was, like Nancy, the daughter of privilege, with household help. But as her sister withdrew from the day-to-day work, her own responsibilities and pressures grew. She engaged authors, outlined and edited books, and handled the finances, cutting pay for writers as syndicate profits fell. (When Benson refused the reduction, another writer took over several of her books, including three Nancy Drews. Within a year her own financial difficulties forced her back at an even lower rate.) The syndicate survived the Depression, and payments to writers were increased. But as the years passed, Adams contended with increasing demands from the publishers for speed and editorial changes. In 1952, she finally brought the writing of all books in-house, under her watchful eye; she herself became Carolyn Keene.
Benson and Adams first met a decade after they began collaborating and seldom thereafter. Their working correspondence enabled Rehak to follow the relationship: Adams pushing Benson to make Nancy more genteel and girlish and soon taking greater control with fuller outlines, partially at Benson’s request, since it made writing easier. Their letters are polite, with Benson sometimes caviling at editorial changes but accepting them.
Any warmth between the two vanished as Benson began telling reporters that she had written many Nancy Drews; Stratemeyer authors had always been instructed to make no such revelations, although some did. First Adams responded by insisting sometimes that Carolyn Keene and her fellows were real (she occasionally supplied their biographical data to Who’s Who) and sometimes that they were indeed pseudonyms for several writers; eventually she claimed to be Nancy’s sole author.
Writing her book, “I felt I was living with them, they were both so forceful in their ways,” Rehak says. “It was hard not to empathize with them at certain times and dislike them at others.”
Conservative And Intrepid
The world, their professions, and their personal lives moved on; Adams and Benson kept working. Adams died in 1982 at eighty-nine, still running the family business. Benson handed in a column to the Toledo Blade on the day she died, in 2002, at ninety-six.
Through it all, Nancy changed little. Her golden hair turned red and when the driving age went up in most states, she became eighteen without gaining any more concern for college, career, or marriage. Whenever she was adjusted to publishers’ demands that she be updated, sales wavered: Nancy was only briefly a college girl with tight jeans and an interest in boys, author of a real cookbook, and spokesperson for a proposed line of clothing and makeup. In the last two decades, highly successful young adult novels have reflected such teenage issues as sex, parents’ divorce, relationship violence, drugs, and drink; Nancy has been popular only when she has been herself: a conservative, intrepid young lady focused on solving mysteries.
Of course, Rehak says. “She’s an emblem, a symbol. We need to know that there’s somebody out there who stands for these very important attributes of intelligence, of bravery and independence of spirit. Part of Nancy’s charm is that these qualities are not muddied by the realities of real life.” Nancy Drew movie and television series and a Nancy Drew doll were short-lived; Rehak speculates that readers prefer to imagine Nancy in their own way.
The pleasure of reading Nancy Drew books is still passed from mothers to daughters and to their daughters, and often to sons, as Rehak has learned on book tours. “There are always men in the audience,” she says. “They raise their hands and tell me that they read the books.”
Media-wise, Nancy is keeping up with the times — she has her own Web site, video games, and graphic novels (the plots are tighter and darker, and Nancy has the wide-eyed manga look). Who knows where technology may take her next? But as long as Nancy remains her upstanding, free-spirited self, Rehak is confident that girls and boys will read her books long after they’ve been sent to bed.
