CAROLYN KEENE? UMM, NO
For years I thought Carolyn Keene was Nancy's author but later discovered Keene was a pen name for Mildred Wirt Benson. The prolific Benson would write 135 of the first Nancy Drew detective tales that came to shape Nancy's "steely bravery," according to an article by Jennifer Fisher in "Zócalo." Benson's image of Nancy would create "the tenacious, bold and independent heroine we have come to know."
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| Mildred Wirt Benson aka Carolyn Keene |
The real author of our favorite girl detective was an Iowa homegrown born in 1905, daughter of a country doctor, and the first student—male or female—to earn a masters degree in journalism from University of Iowa (later home to Iowa Writers Workshop). For 50 years Benson worked in journalism while penning famous mysteries, covering the courthouse beat, crime and corruption at "The Toledo Blade" and "The Toledo Times."
HEADING TO NYC
As a child, Benson was an avid reader of children's classics. Her first short story, "The Courtesy," appeared in "St. Nicholas," a children's magazine, and won her second place in a monthly contest. Finding Iowa too dull for a woman with an agenda, she ventured to NYC and landed a job with an icon in publishing, Edward Stratemeyer. In 1934, "Fortune Magazine" said of Stratemeyer, "As oil and gas has its Rockefeller, literature has its Stratemeyer."
Stratemeyer published The Bobbsey Twins and The Hardy Boys and famously hired ghost writers for a flat monthly fee. Benson's pen name remained a mystery until the 1970s when researchers discovered Benson was the Oz behind the curtain. During the Great Depression and WWII, parents were candid with their children, according to Fisher's article, and didn't hide life's gravities. Enter Nancy Drew, a new kind of heroine for a new age of young girls. Stratemeyer penned a three-page outline for Benson and depicted Nancy as an "up-to-date American girl at her best—bright, clever, resourceful, and full of energy."
TREATED AS AN EQUAL
In 1973 Benson wrote an essay about her famous heroine, stating Nancy was treated as an equal by her father and by many in law enforcement and she never gave up when the going got tough. Her spirit struck a chord. Nancy Drew personified "the dream image which exists within most teenagers," Benson said. According to Fisher's article, this 1930s teen remained culturally relevant for more than 80 years, even as young 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 and that Nancy Drew gave them confidence to be whatever they wanted to be," Benson said in an interview in 1999.
In 1928 she married an AP telegraph operator, Asa Wirt. In 1936, he was transferred to Chicago, and that same year, her daughter Margaret Joan Wirt was born. Neither change of location nor motherhood would deter her, however, from her writing, but things petered out with Stratemeyer as he tried out various other story lines. In 1940 Asa had a stroke. AP transferred him to Toledo, Ohio. He had another stroke in 1943 and permanently left his AP job. These were hard years for her family especially as WWII was raging. But for Mildred, this gave her an opportunity. "The Toledo Times" took on female reporters for the first time, under the stipulation that they knew once the war was over, their work days would be numbered. In 1947 Asa died from complications with another stroke.
Her mother came to live with her and her daughter while Mildred reported for the newspaper. In 1950 she married Edward Benson, an editor at "The Toledo Times." These years were happy ones and they traveled to Puerto Rico and Central America where Mildred gained a fascination with the Maya ruins. In 1959, enroute to Puerto Rico, Benson died unexpectedly.
The next years again were hard as she worked the beat at her newspaper gig. Another juvenile publisher asked if she would consider writing young adult books, but she felt the world had changed too much, and she decided to focus on her reporting, now at "The Toledo Blade."
MAYA CONNECTION
As she always loved to travel and loved the Maya pyramids, she began to charter bush pilots to visit less accessible archeological digs. She canoed down the Usumacinta River to Yaxchilan on a three-day trip with local guides. "I used to hang my hammock in Maya temples, and once, when no other shelter was available, I hung it in a corn crib. Those were my adventurous days."
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| Canoeing Down Usumacinta River |
She traipsed through crocodile-infested rivers and hacked her way through jungles with a machete. She trained as a pilot in the 1960s and took solo trips to Guatemala. Benson was becoming her own best role model for the very Nancy Drew we all came to love.
In a particularly harrowing Nancy Drew-like experience, she was even locked inside a room in Guatemala by locals who thought she knew too much about criminal activity in their town. Channeling Nancy, she overpowered one of her captors and escaped. "Like any good sleuth," reporter Fisher went on to explain, "she later returned to Guatemala to learn more about what had happened to her."
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| Mildred Wirt Benson in Skywriter |
THE SMITHSONIAN
In the 1990s, twenty years after dedicated Nancy Drew lovers had discovered Keene's real name and ID'd Mildred Wirt Benson as Drew's creator, Benson donated a series of papers she'd written about her heroine, along with her trusty Underwood typewriter used for creating Nancy, to the Smithsonian where it sits to this day. And finally, the mystery author got public credit by her native Iowa in 1993 when the University of Iowa had a Nancy Drew Conference. That same year, she was named Person of the Week by ABC's Peter Jennings.
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| Mildred Wirt Benson's Trusty Underwood |
Asked later if she would ever give up writing, Benson said, "The undertaker will have to pry me away from my typewriter." That's pretty much what happened. At 96, in 2002, she was sitting at her trusty Underwood when she died.
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| Unintentional Feminist (From CBC.ca) |
If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon/ And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.
