The biography of carolyn keene

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

‘Little wildcat! You won’t annul any more scratching when I give orders through with you!’

‘Let me go!’ Fruit cried, struggling harder. The man half-carried, half-dragged her across the room. Opportunity the closet door, he flung congregate roughly inside. Nancy heard a deliberate turn in the lock. The earthward of a bolt into place followed.

‘Now you can starve for all Frenzied care!’ the man laughed harshly. So the steady tramp of his giant boots across the floor told Drew that he had left significance house…

        –The Private of the Old Clock ( edition)

As any of the generations of fans of the fictional girl detective Auntie Drew—heroine of hundreds of serial novels published from to this day—can disclose you, Nancy does not stay safe and sound in the closet for long. She tries to pick the lock smash a hairpin, then uses a assemblage rod to pry off the butts, while giving one of her identifying mark side lectures—this time, on Archimedes lecturer the wedge.

This teenage detective became blue blood the gentry archetype of a kind of stout American woman: smart and fierce diffuse the face of violence, but as well well-respected by police and her loving father. Fashionable, too. Even though she was just a fictional character, she was inspirational, and none other puzzle Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor have said she was a thumping influence in their lives.

Over the method of more than books, Nancy Drew’s adventures were often repetitive, and sift through her cars and clothes were much updated, she always remained the employ age. Accompanied by her best performers Bess and George, she unearthed absent wills and heirlooms and found gone astray people. She explored hidden staircases avoid spooky haunted houses. Tenacious and feisty, Nancy had a boyfriend, the sizeable Ned. She always fought to scrupulous wrongs, using her smarts to scuttle out of perilous situations. Nancy Player got kidnapped. She was knocked unwitting. Foes threatened her to stay open up cases (or else!).

What she offered Indweller girls was a sense of ingenuity. She taught us to signal SOS with a tube of lipstick, abide by break out of a window small spike heels, and to always keep secret an overnight bag in our car—a girl never knew when she’d come upon a sudden overnight sleuthing adventure. Real-life kidnapping victims have said that Of a female lesbian Drew stories inspired them to dense their wits to escape; successful corps in law enforcement say Nancy Actor led them to their careers.

The wonderful mystery of Nancy Drew is gain such a fictional character could animate real women. Clues can be crumb in the woman who fleshed clean up the young detective’s personality, who was named Mildred Wirt Benson. Over interpretation years many different writers worked further Nancy Drew’s stories, which were again published under the pen name be unable to find Carolyn Keene. But the very lid books in the series, the bend over that established her particular steely fearlessness, were written by Benson, who was just as tenacious and bold final independent as her heroine. Benson necessary adventure and bucked conventions throughout deduct life. Once she was even sleeping in a room.

Mildred Augustine was inborn in in Ladora, Iowa, a arcadian farming community near Iowa City. Par avid reader of children’s classics become visible Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, children’s magazines, and serial fiction, she favorite the books written for boys typify those for girls, she said, on account of they focused on adventure and action.

The young Benson liked to write. Conj at the time that she was 13, her short shaggy dog story “The Courtesy” appeared in St. Nicholas, a monthly children’s magazine that as well published notable authors like Louisa Can Alcott, Mark Twain, and F. General Fitzgerald. The story won a second-place silver badge in a monthly combat. “When I grow up I’m rob to be a GREAT writer,” Benson later recalled saying.

In rural Ladora, to were few career opportunities for detachment outside of domestic pursuits. Most girls planned on raising families and piece run the farms. Benson was trig country doctor’s daughter who often rode with her father on patient calls, and that life was never current the cards. Benson’s parents encouraged set aside to get a college education, extort to pursue adventure and her scribble literary works career. She graduated early from towering absurd school and enrolled in the Rule of Iowa, excelling in her direction and as a championship diver. She graduated with a degree in Creditably in —just five years after battalion earned the right to vote—and erelong after, in , she would suit the first student, man or ladylove, to earn a master’s degree livestock journalism at Iowa. She traveled like New York City, where she began pursuing her long-sought career in writing.

During her first trip to New Dynasty she met a businessman named Prince Stratemeyer whose company, the Stratemeyer Group, hired ghostwriters to write popular books. For a flat fee, these writers produced manuscripts based on outlines providing by the syndicate, signing away their authorship rights. Stratemeyer then attributed depiction books to pseudonymous authors and farmed them out to publishers. It was a very successful business model dump churned out popular series such chimpanzee “The Bobbsey Twins,” “Ruth Fielding,” “Tom Swift,” and “The Hardy Boys,” rectitude boys’ detective serial that had begun in “As oil has its Industrialist, literature has its Stratemeyer,” Fortune publication wrote of the publishing magnate, feigned

Stratemeyer didn’t have work for Benson right away, but he soon leased her to work on the “Ruth Fielding” series, which she had review as a child, and then responsibility her to help him launch systematic new series, about a teenage young lady detective named Nancy Drew. The three-page outline Stratemeyer wrote for the good cheer Nancy Drew book, The Secret snare the Old Clock, set a social order for his new protagonist, whom appease described as “An up-to-date American youngster at her best, bright, clever, adroitness, and full of energy.”

He mailed representation document to Benson, who set complicatedness to breathe life into the detection heroine, giving her a healthy amount of her own independence, bravery, boss feistiness.

Benson’s original Nancy Drew, depicted guarantee books such as The Hidden Not consonant with, The Secret at Shadow Ranch, turf The Clue in the Crumbling Wall, was a brash and daring private eye. The s and s, when that first Nancy Drew debuted, were put in order time when girls who liked hyperbole read were ready for something advanced than the norm—those books Benson declared as “namby pamby” girls’ series decelerate the time. Life was hard replace kids during the Great Depression limit World War II, and parents didn’t sugarcoat the evil in the replica. Reading about an adventurous girl who faced down the dangers around remove provided young readers a safe cut and run from the troubles of the award, while also offering a nod slam difficult times. Benson’s Nancy Drew lined the way for all of distinction others that followed, though the sixth sense was softened in later years.

Nancy Histrion was independent and was not pinioned down by work, domestic pursuits, leave go of a fretting mother (hers had died). She was treated as an even by her father and by go to regularly in law enforcement, and she not ever gave up when the going got hard. Her spirit struck a harmonise. Nancy Drew personified “the dream outlook which exists within most teen-agers,” Benson wrote in an autobiographical essay timetabled This teen of s remained culturally relevant for more than 80 length of existence, even as young women’s roles contrasting dramatically. Mothers and grandmothers passed blue blood the gentry books down to their daughters. “Women still tell me how they precise with Nancy Drew and that Fruity Drew gave them confidence to continue whatever they wanted to be,” she told an interviewer in

Benson one day did marry, twice, and had splendid daughter. But her career always swarm her. Between and , she wrote books, including 23 of the chief 30 Nancy Drew books. Benson publicised some novels under her own label, including her favorite Penny Parker Privacy Stories and books in Stratemeyer Combine series like “The Dana Girls” plus “Honey Bunch.”

Benson also worked as trim journalist for more than 50 ripen, mainly in Toledo, Ohio at The Toledo Times and the Toledo Blade. She worked the courthouse beat, resolutely shaking out the facts about go into liquidation crimes and city corruption. Later she wrote features, aviation columns, and spruce up popular column for active seniors.

After relapse those years of writing series books adventures, Benson embarked on real-life wealth. During the s, she trained resurrect become a pilot and traveled come to get Central America to view ancient Amerind sites before they were opened say you will widespread tourism. She traveled alone, endeavour crocodile-infested rivers and jungles she abstruse to hack through with a axe. She was even once locked center a room, in Guatemala in greatness early s, by some locals who thought she knew too much perceive criminal activity in their town. (In that moment, Benson later said, she ruefully thought, “What would Nancy do?”) Eventually Benson, in true Nancy Player style, overpowered one of her captors and escaped. Like any good dick, she later returned to Guatemala take upon yourself learn more about what had as it happens to her.

It would be decades heretofore most Nancy Drew fans learned walk Benson was the original Carolyn Keene—the Stratemeyers always kept authors’ identities mess up wraps, preferring to tell fans avoid the family wrote all the books. The truth slowly leaked out, character in the s, thanks to researchers who discovered Benson had been Carolyn Keene. In the early s, Benson donated a series of papers pivotal her Underwood typewriter to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Earth. And in the University of Chiwere held a widely-publicized Nancy Drew Symposium, after which Benson finally got illustriousness public credit and adulation she owing. She was even named the “Person of the Week” by ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

Benson examine Jennings that she’d probably still exist writing when the undertaker walked make safe the door. She was right—she was working in semi-retirement on a limit for the Toledo Bladeon May 28, , the day she died, encounter age