Carolyn Keene: collective pseudonym for author of the Nancy Drew Mystery Series and
the Dana Girls series, started by
Edward Stratemeyer in the late 1920s and selling some 65 million books by the 1990s. The Stratemeyer Syndicate
created
many other successful series, including Tom Swift, The Bobbsey Twins, The Rover Boys, and The Hardy Boys. The
Stratemeyer formula, continued in the Nancy Drew series, includes a safe and pleasant world in which bad guys
are always
brought to justice, wholesome young heroes with an abundance of curiosity, small-time villains such as thieves
and
arsonists, cookie-cutter chapters which end on a note of suspense, and cliché-ridden prose cranked out by
a
stable of
contract writers. Although very conventional in an old-fashioned, upper-middle class way, Nancy Drew is
distinguished
somewhat by her independence and resourcefulness. Harriet Stratemeyer Adams (aka Victor W. Appleton II, Franklin
W.
Dixon, and Laura Lee Hope) became Carolyn Keene when her father died in 1930, wrote several of the early Nancy
Drew
books, and ran the syndicate for 52 years. Like her father, she maintained tight editorial control. Edward
Stratemeyer
had sometimes demanded dozens of rewrites, especially of the crucial opening pages; Harriet Stratemeyer Adams
eschewed
most attempts to modernize her detective heroine, disallowed references to contemporary events or people, and
rejected
cover art if Nancy's hair was too messy or skirt too short. Ms. Adams died of a heart attack on March 27, 1982,
at her
home in Maplewood, NJ, while watching
The Wizard of Oz for the first time on TV.
— Alexander Parritt's Dictionary of Literary Pen Names
(Obewon, 1993)
