She was the classic small-town girl with the big dream. She grew up in a very small town in Iowa, called Ladora, a town of about 300 people. You’re going to marry your hometown sweetheart,” which she did, and she had four children. She wanted to work, but her father said, “Absolutely not. She graduated from Wellesley in 1914, and she had a lot of job offers.
But they wanted her to be educated so she would be a better wife and mother, not so she would do something on her own. Certainly her parents were concerned that she be educated. She grew up very well-to-do in Newark, New Jersey. Harriet was born in 1892 into the tail end of Victorian morals and etiquette. Just that little bit of time contained such progress for women.Ī. One of the things that’s very interesting is that they were not born that far apart – Harriet was born in 1892 and Mildred in 1905 – but that made an enormous difference in terms of what was available to them as girls and as women. Can you talk about the women as individuals? Were they different from each other?Ī.
#NANCY DREW TV SHOW WHODUNIT MOVIE#
With the release of the movie Friday, Rehak, the author of “Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her,” talked about Benson and Adams. The story got even more intriguing when Rehak went to Benson’s alma mater, the University of Iowa, to look over the writer’s papers and found out about Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, the daughter of Benson’s boss, Edward Stratemeyer, who thought up Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys and other children’s-book series.Īdams, it turns out, was the other Carolyn Keene.Īs different as a cloche hat and a baseball cap, the two women were equally responsible for the Nancy Drew books that Rehak – and generations of other women – grew up reading.
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“Not only was Carolyn Keene not a real person, but the person who was Carolyn Keene was an extraordinary, Nancy Drew-like woman, this sort of tough cookie who had a pilot’s license and was a newspaper reporter in the ’40s.” “It seemed like an incredible story,” said Rehak, a writer from Brooklyn. Mildred Benson? But what about Carolyn Keene, the name on the cover of “Secret of the Old Clock,” “The Hidden Staircase” and other Nancy Drew Mystery Series books since the 1930s? Mildred Wirt Benson, a veteran journalist and the author of the “Nancy Drew” books, had died at age 96 in Toledo. Melanie Rehak was driving in the car with her husband one day in the summer of 2002 when she heard something on National Public Radio that made her stop talking and listen closely. Nancy Drew, a big whodunit – Orange County Register Close Menu