writers, the most famous being Edward L. Stratemeyer’s Syndicate. Stratemeyer began his career in the 1890s as a writer of dime novels, but increased his influence on children’s literature exponentially by creating the Syndicate and hiring other writers to create books based on his ideas and skeleton plots (Donelson 1978). The most well-known series produced by the Syndicate are Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift, but there were dozens of others as well, with different titles focusing on male and female audiences and featuring adolescents solving mysteries, travelling the world, flying planes, and engaging in other exciting careers. Nancy Drew, as a model of independence, resourcefulness, and intelligence, has resonated particularly effectively with young women, and post-1970 the series has drawn scholarly attention as lively as the multiple reincarnations of Nancy in text and on screen. Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tillman Romalov (1995) and Melanie Rehak (2005) are among the scholars who have publicized the roles of Mildred Wirt Benson and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams in creating the “original” Nancy Drew – though originality is an elusive concept when discussing a ghost-written character who has gone through so many revisions. During the 1930s and 4190s, Benson wrote 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew novels under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, which would continue to be used for all Nancy Drew titles. However, Adams, who inherited the Syndicate after her father’s death in 1930, rewrote many of Benson’s titles, not only updating the language and removing some of the most racist elements (more on this below), but also completely altering the plot in many cases and revising Nancy’s character to align with a more conservative image of femininity. The rewritten books, with their distinctive gold spines, quickly became the standard edition, and scholars only began to redirect attention to the earlier versions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Nancy Drew books also support a status quo based on class hierarchy. As Carolyn Garpan (2009) notes more generally about girls’ series novels, they often “feature wealthy girls who have every material thing a girl could ever want. If the protagonist is from a middle or lower class family, she … proves she is worthy by obeying and protecting the system” (pp. xi–xii). However, there are exceptions to this rule, particularly in the series created outside the ghost-writing system. One example is the Judy Bolton series, written by Margaret Sutton between 1932 and 1967, which tends to challenge rather than confirm existing hierarchies of class as well as gender (Moran 2009; Parry 1997). Perhaps because of the outlets that girls’ series offered for women who felt limited by the options provided by their society, and the lasting effect the books had on those women – novelist Bobbie Ann Mason’s memoir The Girl Sleuth (1975) has become a classic example – there has been more scholarship about the girls’ series (see also D’Amico 2016) than the boys’, though the latter has also received some attention (Greenwald 2004).
Regardless of the popularity of series books among young people during the first half of the twentieth century, librarians en masse rejected the novels as lacking in both style and substance. A particularly vivid expression of this opinion was “Blowing Out the Boy’s Brains” (1914) by Boy Scouts of America librarian Franklin Mathiews. According to Emily Hamilton-Honey (2012), who cites Mathiews as a key Stratemeyer opponent, “Stratemeyer felt that he was producing books that were morally clean, patriotic, and gave good models for behavior. His books were everything that dime novels were not and had never been; he wanted young people to be reading books that were good for them and would not give them evil ideas or bad habits” (p. 772). Hamilton-Honey argues, however, that adult resistance to series novels was more about their connections to youthful autonomy than their quality or morality; she points out that in addition to depicting empowered young people, they also engendered a sense of economic control in child readers who might be able to afford the cheap prices for the books they desired (p. 773). While series books had been popular as well in the nineteenth century, Hamilton-Honey suggests that the new consumerist direction of twentieth-century series constituted a significant departure from the “safe, community-centered space that encouraged obedience and selflessness as well as social activism,” which was depicted in series by Louisa May Alcott, Martha Finley (author of the Elsie Dinsmore series) and Isabella Macdonald Alden (p. 769). If aetonormativity prompted the division of children’s literature from that for adults and justified adults’ protectively restrictive attitude toward mainstream texts of the twentieth century, then series fiction, along with other rising popular forms like the comic book, gave children the opportunity to claim some cultural territory for their own. The lasting personal and scholarly influence of this fiction should serve as a cautionary tale for adults who assume that their judgment necessarily outranks that of younger readers.
While twentieth-century adult gatekeepers rejected series fiction on aesthetic grounds, more recent assessments find strikingly problematic elements in these novels’ depictions of non-white characters. As Tanfer Emin Tunc comments in “Manifest Destiny’s Child: Mary Hazelton Blanchard Wade and the Literature of American Empire” (2017), the creation of the Stratemeyer Syndicate aligned with the inception of Stratemeyer’s “Old Glory” series, which formed part of a robust imperialist trend in children’s literature in the early decades of the twentieth century (p. 249; see also Sands-O’Connor 2014). Later in the century, attempts to address the most overtly racist images only amounted to whitewashing, as in the Nancy Drew series when Adams simply removed the villainized characters rather than integrating positive images of Black, Asian, Indigenous, or Latinx people. As with so much United States history, therefore, the tradition of US children’s series books intersects with racist ideas from the very beginning.
Early Readers
While concerns over series novels indicated adult anxieties about how adolescents might use literature as a conduit to reject the standards and expectations of their elders, literature for the youngest readers – those who need an adult interpreter of written texts or are just beginning to decipher them independently – remained more reassuringly under adult control. The two genres targeting these audiences, picturebooks and early readers, existed well before 1900, but they underwent significant changes during the twentieth century, intersecting in many ways before diverging more definitively after the 1950s. In distinguishing between the two genres, I follow the comparison put forth by Jennifer M. Miskec and Annette Wannamaker (2016): “Early Readers differ from picturebooks, which often feature more sophisticated and poetic language because they are meant to be read aloud by adults to children, and which also differ from Early Readers in shape, size, and production quality because they privilege illustration as an art form” (pp. 4–5). Significant developments in the form of the picturebook have depended on available printing technologies and have been marked by noticeable moments of innovation, such as Wanda Gág’s double-page spreads in her 1928 Millions of Cats (op de Beeck 2011), while the evolution of the early reader has been driven by literacy theories and marked by changes in tone such as Dr. Seuss’s (Theodor Geisel) famous antidote to the orderly world of Dick and Jane with the chaos of The Cat in the Hat (1957). The Cat’s hijinks, along with Else Holmelund Minarik and Maurice Sendak’s Little Bear series, also initiated in 1957, were the first of the long-lasting Beginner Books and I Can Read! series (Caponegro 2016). As the above quote reveals, picturebooks have carried more aesthetic cachet than early readers, which within the field of children’s literature criticism have been laden with the disdain that the early twentieth century directed toward children’s literature in general; Miskec and Wannamaker’s collection was the first to approach the early reader from a literary-critical perspective. In contrast, the picture-book side of the field, which in the United States during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s included Virginia Lee Burton, Robert McCloskey, and Ludwig Bemelmans, connotes significant aesthetic value: lush illustrations in a wide variety of artistic styles and texts that achieve eloquence and encourage deep thinking, whether the language is spare or detailed. The opportunity for an author/illustrator collaboration in picturebook creation also helps to frame the process as artistically, even personally, enriching, with partnerships such as that of Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson or Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd producing some of the most enduring work from the period (Nel 2012). During the 1960s, some texts began to challenge expectations about how children should interact with picturebooks and what kinds of formats or topics were appropriate for young audiences. Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963), for example, integrates both carefully spaced text and an acceptance
