my passport photo

React Publish your own item

by Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros

May 29, 2002 • Today's weblog

Nancy Drew's "mom" dies: Millie Benson, Toledo Blade columnist and Nancy Drew author, dies at 96

Benson was in the newsroom yesterday writing her column when she got sick, and she died last night at a Toledo hospital.

"I wanted to do something different," Mrs. Benson once said of the Nancy Drew mystery books, which she began in 1930. "The heroines of girls’ books back then were all namby-pamby. I was expressing a sort of tomboy spirit."

Detective series for girls usually tucked their heroines into safe, traditional settings -- nurse (Cherry Ames) or airline stewardess (Vicki Barr, whose boyfriends were a handsome pilot and a scruffy reporter). Benson, herself a pilot and a reporter, was swept under the rug.

The obit her colleagues wrote for her documents an adventurous life, and one studded with unfairness: For writing the first 23 Nancy Drew mysteries, Benson received a flat $125 -- no royalties -- for each book, which she wrote under the pen name Carolyn Keene. She was not permitted to say she wrote them or to use the pen name for anything else till a 1980 court proceeding finally allowed her to claim her own work. This obit is worth reading.

Yes. My 10-year-old self wishes I'd thanked Millie Benson. Via Jim Romenesko's Media News
Link to this item | Comment