NANCY DREW

Nancy Drew is the fictional star of the Nancy Drew book series. She is
characterized to be a blue eyed, blonde-haired teenage sleuth with an eye
for detective work, and resides in the upper-middle class town of Riverside
Heights.
The Nancy Drew books have been in print since the 1930s, making it one of
the longest book series to be published. The character itself has changed
through the decades, although the basic premise of a young girl solving
mysteries and crime remains the same.
In the first few books that appeared in the 1930s, Nancy Drew was sixteen
years old and quite obviously wealthy. She was also somewhat arrogant and
reckless, and even carried a gun. This was later revised to fit the now
standard character of Nancy Drew as a more typical, though still rather
privileged, eighteen year old American girl.
Nancy Drew has two best friends, slightly boy-crazy Bess Marvin and
tomboyish George Fayne, and a boyfriend, Ned Nickerson. With her mother
dead when Nancy was two, she lives with her father, a well known lawyer
named Carson Drew, and a housekeeper, Hannah Gruen, who is a kind of
mother figure in her life.
The Nancy Drew books are all credited to one author, Carolyn Keene. Carolyn
Keene herself, however, is fictional. The books were first conceived, although
not written, by Edward Stratemeyer in 1930. Stratemeyer wrote an outline,
but the actual writing of the first novel was done by Mildred Benson.
Stratemeyer's daughter, Harriet Adams, edited the work. It was later
revealed that Mildred Benson wrote the first 22 books of the original series.
Currently, Nancy Drew now only comes out in print via a new graphic novel
series published by Papercutz. Video games, films, and TV shows based on
the books have been released, with limited success.