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The various Nancy Drew series have been authored by dozens of ghostwriters, each author being disguised by the pseudonym "Carolyn Keene." Edward Stratemeyer, director of the Stratemeyer Syndi-cate-an early twentieth-century publishing group-is credited with originating the character of Nancy Drew. Still relevant to readers over seventy years after her initial debut, Nancy Drew is currently the lead protagonist in a number of concurrent mystery series targeting a variety of audiences, including the "Nancy Drew Files," "Nancy Drew on Campus," "River Heights," "Nancy Drew Notebooks," and "Nancy Drew & Hardy Boys Supermysteries" series, among others. While not the sole female detective in juvenile literature, Nancy Drew has endured as the genre's preeminent girl detective, while many of her early contemporaries and upstart rivals have faded into obscurity.
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While Nancy has evolved throughout her lengthy sleuthing career and has seen her exploits charted by a myriad of ghostwriters, she remains, in the words of Anne Scott MacLeod, "the very embodiment of every girl's deepest yearning … an image that combines the fundamental impulse of feminism with utter conventionality." Her novels blend mystery, adventure, and gothic settings, often obeying the familiar series fiction pattern where events proceed in similar orders, a formula that breeds comfort between reader and text. Courageous, daring, and fully autonomous in an era when such characteristics were frowned upon in young ladies, Nancy Drew is regarded by many as the vanguard of a new frontier in juvenile girl's literature. Begun in 1930 by the Stratemeyer Syndicate as a female counterpart to their earlier "Hardy Boys Mystery" series, Nancy Drew was an immediate hit with her primarily adolescent female readership. Starring an independent-minded young woman with a passion for crime-solving, the various incarnations of the "Nancy Drew Mysteries" have sold over two hundred million copies worldwide over their seventy-five year lifespan and are often credited with espousing a prototype of juvenile feminism. The following entry presents commentary on the "Nancy Drew" juvenile novel series (1930–2006), written under the pseudonym "Carolyn Keene," through 2003.