In Stratemeyer's view, it was the thrill of feeling grown-up and the desire for a series of stories that made such reading attractive to children.
The first series that Stratemeyer created was The Rover Boys, published under the pseudonym Arthur M. Winfield in 30 volumes between 1899 and 1926, which sold over five million copies.
In the 1950s, Harriet began substantially revising old volumes in The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, updating them by removing references to outdated cultural elements, such as "roadster".
Racial slurs and stereotypes were also removed, and in some cases (such as The Secret at Shadow Ranch and The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion) entire plots were cast off and replaced with new ones.
[8] Grosset & Dunlap held firm; it had received an increasing number of letters from parents who were offended by the stereotypes present in the books, particularly in The Hardy Boys publications.
'"[17] Series books were considered to ruin a child's chances for gaining an appreciation of good literature (which was subsequently shown by one study not to be the case),[18] and to undermine respect for authority: "Much of the contempt for social conventions ... is due to the reading of this poisonous sort of fiction.
"[19] Franklin K. Mathiews, chief librarian for the Boy Scouts of America, wrote that series books were a method, according to the title of one of his articles, for "Blowing Out the Boys' Brains",[20] and psychologist G. Stanley Hall articulated one of the most common concerns by asserting that series books would ruin girls in particular by giving them "false views of [life] ... which will cloud her life with discontent in the future".
[21] None of this hurt sales and Stratemeyer was unperturbed, even when his books were banned from the Newark Public Library as early as 1901, writing to a publisher: "Personally it does not matter much to me.
[23] By the 1970s, Nancy Drew stories had “been translated into Spanish, Swedish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.
[24] Other series reprinted outside the States include The Dana Girls, The Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins (in Australia, France, Sweden, and the UK).
Victor Appleton; Richard Barnum; Gerald Breckenridge; Nicholas Carter; Lester Chadwick; Allen Chapman; Alice B. Emerson; Howard Roger Garis; Mabel C. Hawley; Laura Lee Hope; Gertrude W. Morrison; Margaret Penrose; Homer Randall; Roy Rockwood; Frank V. Webster; Arthur M. Winfield; Mildred A. Wirt (Benson); Clarence Young Not found 2023 as Gutenberg authors: Franklin W. Dixon; Carolyn Keene; Eugene Martin