By Barbara Lounsberry

 

Nancy Drew is 90.

 

The beloved girl detective, whose character and style were formed in 1930 by Iowa’s Mildred Augustine, is today an international icon, portrayed in films, plays, art works, ballets — and even a current television series.

 

In the first Nancy Drew Mystery, “The Secret of the Old Clock,” Augustine wrote: “Like a true daughter of the Middle West, Nancy Drew took pride in the fertility of her state and saw beauty in a crop of waving green corn as well as in the rolling hills and the expanse of prairie land.”

 

This was her hymn to Iowa.

 

Today more than 200 million copies of Nancy Drew mysteries have been sold, and her books have been translated into 45 languages. In the early 1990s, Nancy’s sales surpassed those of her male counterparts, the Hardy Boys. Today Nancy Drew is the most popular teen detective in the world.

 

If you grew up reading — and maybe even wanting to be Nancy Drew — you join fine company. Journalists Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer, opera singer Beverly Sills, actresses Candace Bergen and Cate Blanchett, media mogul Oprah Winfrey and all three female Supreme Court justices — including the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg — have spoken of being spurred on to achievement by having Nancy Drew as an early role model.

 

The hidden author

 

Few know, however, that an Iowa woman wrote the first seven Nancy Drew mysteries — in fact, wrote 23 of the first 30 volumes. You see, there is no “Carolyn Keene.” Carolyn Keene was the pen name for Mildred Augustine and her successors who wrote the actual volumes. All had to sign contracts of secrecy and this excessive secrecy robbed Augustine of recognition for her important contributions to young people’s reading — and to American popular culture.

 

The life of Augustine and “The Secret of Nancy Drew’s Success” are as fascinating as any of Nancy’s mysteries. Nancy’s actual “father” was Edward Stratemeyer who was a great friend of Horatio Alger, Jr. In the late 1800s, the immensely popular Alger books — “Strive and Succeed,” “Try and Trust” and many others — helped create the American Dream. The formula was simple: poor boy, works hard — and succeeds. But they were boys.

 

Stratemeyer learned much from Alger, and in 1906 he founded the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a “fiction factory” for juvenile fiction. “The Bobbsey Twins,” “The Rover Boys,” “The Hardy Boys” and “Tom Swift” were among the more than 60 adventure series Stratemeyer created, and he set up an ingenious method of working. He would develop the idea for a new series, but he then relied on a stable of hired ghostwriters to flesh out the brief plot outlines he would give them into manuscripts that he would then revise and proofread.  

 

Each series had a phony name as the author and the real writers signed a contract pledging they would not reveal they were the real authors. They were paid a set fee for each manuscript, but the Syndicate held the copyright for all the books, and collected all the royalties. The honorable hired writers, including Iowa’s Augustine, kept their pledges of secrecy — even when it was clear Nancy Drew was selling more than two million volumes a year.

 

TO READ THE ENTIRE STORY AND OTHER FASCINATING STORIES ABOUT IOWA HISTORY, subscribe to Iowa History Journal.