Nancy Drew

About Nancy Drew

Nancy Drew is an amateur sleuth, the fictional heroine of a popular mystery series, primarily aimed at the children-young adult audience, and written under the collective pseudonym "Carolyn Keene". The series was created and outlined in detail in 1930 by Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, with the first manuscripts written by Mildred A. Wirt Benson and edited by Stratemeyer's daughter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. The Stratemeyer Syndicate had a strict non-disclosure contract; writers such as Mildred Benson produced books based upon outlines provided by the Syndicate. As a ghostwriter, Benson was the second most prolific writer (after Stratemeyer-Adams herself), producing twenty-three of the first thirty volumes.

Nancy Drew was depicted as an independent-minded teenager, who has already completed her high school education. She is sixteen at the beginning of the series, but gradually aged to eighteen by the mid 1940s (this was changed when the original books were later revised; she is always eighteen), by then necessary to graduate from school in many states. Apparently affluent, she maintains an active social, volunteer, and sleuthing schedule, as well as participating in athletics and the arts, but is never shown as working for a living or acquiring job skills. Nancy is also unhindered by the Great Depression and World War II.

Nancy lives with her father, attorney Carson Drew. In volume one of the original series, it is stated that Nancy's mother died when Nancy was ten years old (changed to three in later revisions); volume four expands upon the idea by indicating she has managed a servant and the household for her father since that time. This fact was changed in later revisions.