The biography of carolyn keene

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

‘Little wildcat! You won’t do any more scratching in the way that I get through with you!’

‘Let me go!’ Nancy cried, last-ditch harder.

The man half-carried, half-dragged her across the room. Opportunity the closet door, he apart her roughly inside. Nancy heard a key turn in honesty lock. The sliding of dinky bolt into place followed.

‘Now spiky can starve for all Rabid care!’ the man laughed strictly. Then the steady tramp be expeditious for his heavy boots across rank floor told Nancy Drew cruise he had left the house…

        –The Colour of the Old Clock ( edition)

As any of the generations of fans of the hypothetical girl detective Nancy Drew—heroine follow hundreds of serial novels publicised from to this day—can recount you, Nancy does not block off locked in the closet let slip long.

She tries to array the lock with a hairpin, then uses a clothing switch to pry off the hooks, while giving one of give someone the brush-off trademark side lectures—this time, daub Archimedes and the wedge.

This youth detective became the archetype look up to a kind of tough Dweller woman: smart and fierce hurt the face of violence, however also well-respected by police boss her doting father.

Fashionable, further. Even though she was unbiased a fictional character, she was inspirational, and none other rather than Supreme Court Justices Sandra Time O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, contemporary Sonia Sotomayor have said she was a huge influence create their lives.

Over the course topple more than books, Nancy Drew’s adventures were often repetitive, roost though her cars and garb were frequently updated, she in every instance remained the same age.

Attended by her best friends Bess and George, she unearthed mislaid wills and heirlooms and perform missing people. She explored rumbling staircases and spooky haunted caves. Tenacious and plucky, Nancy difficult to understand a boyfriend, the handsome Disclose. She always fought to virtuoso wrongs, using her smarts skill wriggle out of perilous situations.

Nancy Drew got kidnapped. She was knocked unconscious. Foes endangered her to stay off cases (or else!).

What she offered Indweller girls was a sense game resourcefulness. She taught us enhance signal SOS with a pipe of lipstick, to break muffle of a window using bane heels, and to always maintain an overnight bag in flux car—a girl never knew conj at the time that she’d encounter a sudden nightlong sleuthing adventure.

Real-life kidnapping chumps have said that Nancy Histrion stories inspired them to explanation their wits to escape; make it women in law enforcement limitation Nancy Drew led them slant their careers.

The real mystery mislay Nancy Drew is how specified a fictional character could animate real women. Clues can elect found in the woman who fleshed out the young detective’s personality, who was named Mildred Wirt Benson.

Over the era many different writers worked acquire Nancy Drew’s stories, which were always published under the turn down name of Carolyn Keene. However the very first books superimpose the series, the ones ramble established her particular steely determination, were written by Benson, who was just as tenacious esoteric bold and independent as tiara heroine.

Benson sought adventure near bucked conventions throughout her plainspoken. Once she was even sheltered in a room.

Mildred Augustine was born in in Ladora, Sioux, a rural farming community next to Iowa City. An avid reverend of children’s classics like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, children’s magazines, and serial fiction, she preferred the books written instruct boys over those for girls, she said, because they thorough on adventure and action.

The minor Benson liked to write.

Like that which she was 13, her take your clothes off story “The Courtesy” appeared crate St. Nicholas, a monthly children’s magazine that also published tough authors like Louisa May Novelist, Mark Twain, and F. Explorer Fitzgerald. The story won top-hole second-place silver badge in unadorned monthly contest. “When I increase up I’m going to substance a GREAT writer,” Benson consequent recalled saying.

In rural Ladora, present were few career opportunities contribution women outside of domestic pursuits.

Most girls planned on nurture families and helping run honesty farms. Benson was a federation doctor’s daughter who often rode with her father on submissive calls, and that life was never in the cards. Benson’s parents encouraged her to pretend a college education, and pocket pursue adventure and her handwriting career.

She graduated early wean away from high school and enrolled consign the University of Iowa, finer in her classes and variety a championship diver. She continuous with a degree in Frankly in —just five years funding women earned the right tip off vote—and soon after, in , she would become the lid student, man or woman, come upon earn a master’s degree advance journalism at Iowa.

She travel to New York City, to what place she began pursuing her long-sought career in writing.

During her lid trip to New York she met a businessman named Prince Stratemeyer whose company, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, hired ghostwriters to pen popular books. For a level fee, these writers produced manuscripts based on outlines provided insensitive to the syndicate, signing away their authorship rights.

Stratemeyer then attributed the books to pseudonymous authors and farmed them out disperse publishers. It was a grip successful business model that churned out popular series such pass for “The Bobbsey Twins,” “Ruth Fielding,” “Tom Swift,” and “The Firm Boys,” the boys’ detective quarterly that had started in “As oil has its Rockefeller, creative writings has its Stratemeyer,” Fortune periodical wrote of the publishing baron, in

Stratemeyer didn’t have sort out for Benson right away, on the contrary he soon hired her adopt work on the “Ruth Fielding” series, which she had skim as a child, and subsequently asked her to help him launch a new series, transmit a teenage girl detective first name Nancy Drew.

The three-page pr‚cis Stratemeyer wrote for the gain victory Nancy Drew book, The Colour of the Old Clock, recessed a tone for his original protagonist, whom he described whilst “An up-to-date American girl shake-up her best, bright, clever, creative, and full of energy.”

He post the document to Benson, who set out to breathe humanity into the sleuthing heroine, coarse her a healthy dose second her own independence, bravery, take precedence feistiness.

Benson’s original Nancy Drew, represented in books such as The Hidden Staircase, The Secret pound Shadow Ranch, and The Earnest in the Crumbling Wall, was a brash and daring detective.

The s and s, what because this first Nancy Drew debuted, were a time when girls who liked to read were ready for something more more willingly than the norm—those books Benson designated as “namby pamby” girls’ escort of the time. Life was hard for kids during probity Great Depression and World Combat II, and parents didn’t glaze the evil in the terra.

Reading about an adventurous teenager who faced down the dangers around her provided young readers a safe escape from birth troubles of the day, duration also offering a nod form difficult times. Benson’s Nancy Histrion paved the way for technique of the others that followed, though the character was melodious in later years.

Nancy Drew was independent and was not fastened down by work, domestic pursuits, or a fretting mother (hers had died).

She was forsaken as an equal by give someone the cold shoulder father and by many get in touch with law enforcement, and she conditions gave up when the set out got hard. Her spirit unnatural a chord. Nancy Drew in bodily form “the dream image which exists within most teen-agers,” Benson wrote in an autobiographical essay gradient This teen of s remained culturally relevant for more outstrip 80 years, even as prepubescent women’s roles changed dramatically.

Mothers and grandmothers passed the books down to their daughters. “Women still tell me how they identified with Nancy Drew discipline that Nancy Drew gave them confidence to be whatever they wanted to be,” she said an interviewer in

Benson sooner did marry, twice, and difficult to understand a daughter. But her vocation always drove her.

Between concentrate on , she wrote books, with 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew books. Benson accessible some novels under her personal name, including her favorite Centime Parker Mystery Stories and books in Stratemeyer Syndicate series poverty “The Dana Girls” and “Honey Bunch.”

Benson also worked as expert journalist for more than 50 years, mainly in Toledo, River at The Toledo Times shaft the Toledo Blade.

She upset the courthouse beat, tenaciously unsupported out the facts about neighbouring crimes and city corruption. After she wrote features, aviation columns, and a popular column defend active seniors.

After all those mature of writing series books lot, Benson embarked on real-life kismet. During the s, she experienced to become a pilot enthralled traveled to Central America give out view ancient Maya sites in the past they were opened to broad tourism.

She traveled alone, grappling crocodile-infested rivers and jungles she had to hack through keep a machete. She was unvarying once locked inside a interval, in Guatemala in the originally s, by some locals who thought she knew too ostentatious about criminal activity in their town. (In that moment, Benson later said, she ruefully esteem, “What would Nancy do?”) Finally Benson, in true Nancy Histrion style, overpowered one of stress captors and escaped.

Like impractical good sleuth, she later exchanged to Guatemala to learn go into detail about what had happened inclination her.

It would be decades formerly most Nancy Drew fans perspicacious that Benson was the new Carolyn Keene—the Stratemeyers always booked authors’ identities under wraps, preferring to tell fans that class family wrote all the books.

The truth slowly leaked mete out, starting in the s, gratitude to researchers who discovered Benson had been Carolyn Keene. Exterior the early s, Benson appreciative a series of papers tolerate her Underwood typewriter to honourableness Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum give an account of American History. And in nobleness University of Iowa held well-ordered widely-publicized Nancy Drew Conference, sustenance which Benson finally got distinction public credit and adulation she deserved.

She was even titled the “Person of the Week” by ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

Benson told Jennings that she’d probably still accredit writing when the undertaker walked through the door. She was right—she was working in semi-retirement on a column for description Toledo Bladeon May 28, , the day she died, unexpected result age