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March 27, 2006
Nancy Drew's Father - Part II
Edward Stratemeyer was born in 1862 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. His parents, Henry and Anna, were middle-class German immigrants with a staunch work ethic. Henry was a tobacconist, and Anna, who had been married to Henry's brother before his death, reared six children; Edward was the youngest. As a boy, he idled away his time reading the popular rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger and William T. Adams (a.k.a. Oliver Optic). As a teen-ager, he had a printing press and amused friends by printing broadsheets and stories, including an early effort titled "Revenge! or, The Newsboy's Adventure". His father spoke to him of wasting time. According to Deidre Johnson's "Edward Stratemeyer and the Stratemeyer Syndicate". he was twenty-six when he sold his first story "Victor Horton's Idea" to Golden Days, the beloved boys' magazine, for seventy-five dollars - about six times the standard weekly wage. Later, he liked to claim that he had written the story on brown wrapping paper in the tobacco store, and recalled showing the magazine's check to his father, who promptly said, "You'd better write a lot more for them."
He did. He wrote "Poor but Plucky" as Fred Frisky. He wrote "Dashing Dave, the Ever Ready Detective" as Captain Ravell Pinkerton, of the U.S. Secret Service. He wrote "Joe Johnson, the Bicycle Wonder" as Roy Rockwood. He aslo worked as a stationer - he did not sell enough stories to support himself - and then, later, became an editor at Good News, where his heroes Alger and Optic published their work.
Every Horatio Alger hero's rise to riches depends on a lucky break. Stratemeyer's was his proximity to Alger himself. In 1898, the older man, in failing health, wrote to Stratemeyer at Good News and asked him to complete a story that he was too ill to finish. "Can you take my story and finish it in my style?" he inquired. "You will divide the proceeds equally with me but I shall retain the copyright . . . I fancy it would be easy work for you as you have a fluent & facile style."
In truth, Stratemeyer's style was much like Alger's; each was of the "Maggie, for this was the name by which she was universally known" school of circumlocution. Stratemeyer took on the job and ultimately completed several of Alger's unfinished manuscripts for posthumous publication. (Alger died in 1899.) Then, in the late eighteen-nineties, Gilbert Patten began publishing his stories about Frank Merriwell, America's first fictional schoolboy hero. The success of the Merriwell dime novels is hard to conceive of today: they sold a hundred and twenty-five million copies over two decades. Stratemeyer, who had given Patten his start at Good News, decided that he could improve on the invention. The result in 1899, was "The Rover Boys" - the schoolboy exploits of three wisecracking brothers named Tom, Dick, and Sam. It was an immediate hit.
Stratemeyer's timing was superb. The spread of primary education had spawned a host of independent young readers, and juvenile fiction was on the verge of becoming hugely popular. The dime novel, which had emerged in 1860, had created an appetite among children for more exciting fare than Sunday-school moralism. What Stratemeyer brought to this burgeoning market was not literary brilliance; the early Rover Boyd books are crudely written at best. But he had two essential gifts: a knack for coming up with ideas, and organizational genius. As Henry Ford was revolutionizing the auto industry, Stratemeyer was revolutionizing the way children's books were produced. The boy who had played at the printing press had learned how to put his singlemindedness to work for him.
The most daunting obstacle facing publishers at the turn of the century wasn't finding good stories but figuring out how to package and distribute them. Advertising was relatively uncommon, and, in any case, children didn't read the newspaper. Salesmem travelled around the country, selling books from publishers' lists, but this system was highly inefficient.
New printing techniques had made it easier to manufacture good-looking books for less than ever before. Most "quality" hardcover juvenile fiction cost a dollar or a dollar twenty-five, but it was still primarily instructional. The most famous of these was the Rollo series, about a boy who travelled through Europe with his uncle, learning the virtue of honesty. For excitement, people had the Deadwood Dicks and the Lone Star Lizzies, low-end dime novels aimed at working-class men and read on the sly by boys - and some girls - everywhere. (Publishers assumed that girls would happily read boys' books but not vice versa.)
To Be Continued . . .
Posted by mysterygamers at March 27, 2006 11:19 PM