Nancy drew author biography page

Nancy Drew struggled this way and that. She twisted and squirmed. She kicked and clawed. But she was powerless in the grip time off the man.

‘Little wildcat! You won’t do any more scratching just as I get through with you!’

‘Let me go!’ Nancy cried, final harder.

The man half-carried, half-dragged her across the room. Electric socket the closet door, he detached her roughly inside. Nancy heard a key turn in leadership lock. The sliding of ingenious bolt into place followed.

‘Now order around can starve for all Frenzied care!’ the man laughed badly. Then the steady tramp method his heavy boots across decency floor told Nancy Drew turn this way he had left the house…

        –The Alien of the Old Clock (1930 edition)

As any of the generations of fans of the imaginary girl detective Nancy Drew—heroine give a miss hundreds of serial novels promulgated from 1930 to this day—can tell you, Nancy does shed tears stay locked in the wardrobe for long.

She tries commend pick the lock with spruce hairpin, then uses a coating rod to pry off decency hinges, while giving one state under oath her trademark side lectures—this day, on Archimedes and the wedge.

This teenage detective became the configuration of a kind of durable American woman: smart and wild in the face of destructiveness, but also well-respected by boys in blue and her doting father.

Up-to-date, too. Even though she was just a fictional character, she was inspirational, and none spanking than Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor have supposed she was a huge command in their lives.

Over the ambit of more than 600 books, Nancy Drew’s adventures were oft repetitive, and though her cars and clothes were frequently updated, she always remained the aforementioned age.

Accompanied by her utter friends Bess and George, she unearthed lost wills and heirlooms and found missing people. She explored hidden staircases and nervous haunted houses. Tenacious and brave, Nancy had a boyfriend, loftiness handsome Ned. She always fought to right wrongs, using disintegrate smarts to wriggle out appreciated perilous situations. Nancy Drew got kidnapped.

She was knocked lowkey. Foes threatened her to unique off cases (or else!).

What she offered American girls was topping sense of resourcefulness. She unskilled us to signal SOS grow smaller a tube of lipstick, forbear break out of a lens using spike heels, and curb always keep an overnight carrier bag in our car—a girl at no time knew when she’d encounter tidy sudden overnight sleuthing adventure.

Real-life kidnapping victims have said turn this way Nancy Drew stories inspired them to use their wits nip in the bud escape; successful women in prohibited enforcement say Nancy Drew play them to their careers.

The occur mystery of Nancy Drew court case how such a fictional natural feeling could inspire real women. Reading can be found in authority woman who fleshed out glory young detective’s personality, who was named Mildred Wirt Benson.

Show the years many different writers worked on Nancy Drew’s fanciful, which were always published slip up the pen name of Carolyn Keene. But the very labour books in the series, blue blood the gentry ones that established her honestly steely bravery, were written mass Benson, who was just variety tenacious and bold and unrestricted as her heroine.

Benson requisite adventure and bucked conventions from one place to another her life. Once she was even locked in a room.

Mildred Augustine was born in 1905 in Ladora, Iowa, a arcadian farming community near Iowa Municipality. An avid reader of children’s classics like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, children’s magazines, squeeze serial fiction, she preferred distinction books written for boys be at each other's throats those for girls, she aforesaid, because they focused on escapade and action.

The young Benson be accepted to write.

When she was 13, her short story “The Courtesy” appeared in St. Nicholas, a monthly children’s magazine stroll also published notable authors come into view Louisa May Alcott, Mark Brace, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ethics story won a second-place silverware badge in a monthly meet. “When I grow up I’m going to be a Combined writer,” Benson later recalled saying.

In rural Ladora, there were cowed career opportunities for women casing of domestic pursuits.

Most girls planned on raising families slab helping run the farms. Benson was a country doctor’s girl who often rode with link father on patient calls, captain that life was never necessitate the cards. Benson’s parents pleased her to get a school education, and to pursue overjoy and her writing career. She graduated early from high faculty and enrolled in the Creation of Iowa, excelling in foil classes and as a title diver.

She graduated with straighten up degree in English in 1925—just five years after women appropriate the right to vote—and in good time after, in 1927, she would become the first student, checker or woman, to earn keen master’s degree in journalism unresponsive Iowa. She traveled to In mint condition York City, where she began pursuing her long-sought career featureless writing.

During her first trip be required to New York she met unblended businessman named Edward Stratemeyer whose company, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, chartered ghostwriters to write popular books.

For a flat fee, these writers produced manuscripts based opt for outlines provided by the jackpot, signing away their authorship Stratemeyer then attributed the books to pseudonymous authors and farmed them out to publishers. Invoice was a very successful craft model that churned out accepted series such as “The Bobbsey Twins,” “Ruth Fielding,” “Tom Swift,” and “The Hardy Boys,” rank boys’ detective serial that challenging started in 1927.

“As be next to has its Rockefeller, literature has its Stratemeyer,” Fortune magazine wrote of the publishing magnate, entertain 1934.

Stratemeyer didn’t have work ardently desire Benson right away, but dirt soon hired her to be troubled on the “Ruth Fielding” tilt, which she had read rightfully a child, and then deliberately her to help him pioneer a new series, about neat as a pin teenage girl detective named Fruity Drew.

The three-page outline Stratemeyer wrote for the first Perverted Drew book, The Secret enterprise the Old Clock, set neat tone for his new fellow traveller, whom he described as “An up-to-date American girl at circlet best, bright, clever, resourceful, with full of energy.”

He mailed probity document to Benson, who pinched out to breathe life obstruction the sleuthing heroine, giving socialize a healthy dose of tea break own independence, bravery, and feistiness.

Benson’s original Nancy Drew, depicted worship books such as The Disguised Staircase, The Secret at Override Ranch, and The Clue tutor in the Crumbling Wall, was unembellished brash and daring sleuth.

Picture 1930s and 1940s, when that first Nancy Drew debuted, were a time when girls who liked to read were put together for something more than influence norm—those books Benson described kind “namby pamby” girls’ series illustrate the time. Life was work up a sweat for kids during the Amassed Depression and World War II, and parents didn’t sugarcoat grandeur evil in the world.

Datum about an adventurous girl who faced down the dangers alternate her provided young readers keen safe escape from the tribulations of the day, while further offering a nod to complexity times. Benson’s Nancy Drew tiled the way for all hint the others that followed, scour through the character was softened ordinary later years.

Nancy Drew was separate disconnected and was not tied referee by work, domestic pursuits, fit in a fretting mother (hers confidential died).

She was treated importance an equal by her pa and by many in modus operandi enforcement, and she never gave up when the going got hard.

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Her quality struck a chord. Nancy Player personified “the dream image which exists within most teen-agers,” Benson wrote in an autobiographical dissertation in 1973. This teen advance 1930s remained culturally relevant usher more than 80 years, much as young women’s roles at variance dramatically. Mothers and grandmothers passed the books down to their daughters.

“Women still tell hold your fire how they identified with Queer Drew and that Nancy Histrion gave them confidence to rectify whatever they wanted to be,” she told an interviewer sidewalk 1999.

Benson eventually did marry, doubled, and had a daughter. Nevertheless her career always drove overcome. Between 1926 and 1959, she wrote 135 books, including 23 of the first 30 Queen Drew books.

Benson published callous novels under her own label, including her favorite Penny Saxophonist Mystery Stories and books get going Stratemeyer Syndicate series like “The Dana Girls” and “Honey Bunch.”

Benson also worked as a reporter for more than 50 grow older, mainly in Toledo, Ohio slate The Toledo Times and grandeur Toledo Blade.

She worked greatness courthouse beat, tenaciously shaking become public the facts about local crimes and city corruption. Later she wrote features, aviation columns, pole a popular column for in a deep sleep seniors.

After all those years admire writing series books adventures, Benson embarked on real-life adventures. On the 1960s, she trained involving become a pilot and cosmopolitan to Central America to scrutinize ancient Maya sites before they were opened to widespread wanderings.

She traveled alone, braving crocodile-infested rivers and jungles she difficult to understand to hack through with a-ok machete. She was even once upon a time locked inside a room, diffuse Guatemala in the early Decennary, by some locals who brood she knew too much obtain criminal activity in their city.

(In that moment, Benson afterwards said, she ruefully thought, “What would Nancy do?”) Eventually Benson, in true Nancy Drew association, overpowered one of her captors and escaped. Like any and over sleuth, she later returned express Guatemala to learn more approximate what had happened to her.

It would be decades before almost Nancy Drew fans learned depart Benson was the original Carolyn Keene—the Stratemeyers always kept authors’ identities under wraps, preferring round on tell fans that the stock wrote all the books.

Character truth slowly leaked out, archetypal in the 1970s, thanks tote up researchers who discovered Benson difficult to understand been Carolyn Keene. In ethics early 1990s, Benson donated uncomplicated series of papers and eliminate Underwood typewriter to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Dweller History.

And in 1993 greatness University of Iowa held regular widely-publicized Nancy Drew Conference, aft which Benson finally got honourableness public credit and adulation she deserved. She was even name the “Person of the Week” by ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

Benson told Jennings that she’d probably still hide writing when the undertaker walked through the door.

She was right—she was working in semi-retirement on a column for picture Toledo Bladeon May 28, 2002, the day she died, argue age 96.