“Carolyn Keene” Dies, well sort of.
Posted by jen May 30th, 2002 in Jeneral.The original author of the Nancy Drew Mysteries, Millie Benson, is dead at 96. Several toted the name after she stopped but she was the original. She defined the rest. She defined the character everyone else would use. No one even knew she wrote them until about twenty years ago.
I was never a huge Nancy fan but it was a piece of my life. My mom’s childhood friend (actually named Nancy) was a fan, and while I was growing up every birthday and Christmas till I was about 12 I got a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys book from her. (Yeah the prized blue covers mentioned in the article later.)
I tried to read them, especially during the summers. I even tried to make it a reading challenge to read them all in a summer, I think I read one. I tried to read more, but the language was so dated and the situations so preposterous I just couldn’t stomach it with all the “gee wilikers!” and such tossed around.
But I knew what they were. They were what we’d call “Girl Power” today. Back then I’m surprised they didn’t burn them. But, anyway, growing when I did, we already knew you could be anything you wanted so Nancy Drew didn’t really sing the same message as she did to say my mother’s friend.
But theres’s a few cool stories about Millie all the same. Sounds like she was a fun dame who we all would’ve liked to have known sooner, and appreciated as a character all her own long before she died.
2 Responses to ““Carolyn Keene” Dies, well sort of.”
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The Nancy Drew mystery stories were ALL composed and written by Edward, Edna and, primarily, Harriet Stratemeyer(Adams), NOT Mildred Benson. Forty Three of Nancy Drew’s fifty seven mystery adventure stories, while under control of the Stratemeyer Writing Syndicate, were entirely written by Harriet Adams. They were conceived by her, based on her life experiences, and every aspect of the stories, from the title, the plot, to the syntax used was hers, NOT Ms. Benson’s. From its debut, final editorial control of the Nancy Drew stories, from her father’s first three, herself and her sister’s subsequent ten, Andy Svenson’s one, to her forty three was Harriet Adams’. The stories were NEVER “written” by Mildred Benson. I refer you to an article at http://womenhistory.about.com/library/weekly/ucnancydrew2n.htm for the correct facts.
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