Creation of Characters
The characters were conceived in 1926 by Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a book-packaging firm. Stratemeyer initially pitched the new series to publishers Grosset & Dunlap and suggested that the boys might be called the Keene Boys, the Scott Boys, the Hart Boys, or the Bixby Boys. Grosset & Dunlap editors, for reasons unknown, chose the name "The Hardy Boys" and approved the project. Stratemeyer accordingly hired Canadian Leslie McFarlane to ghostwrite the first volumes in the series. McFarlane would author nineteen of the first twenty-five volumes in the series. Subsequent titles have been written by a number of different ghostwriters, all under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon. The first three titles were published in 1927, and were an immediate success: by mid-1929 over 115,000 books had been sold. So successful was the series that Stratemeyer created the character of Nancy Drew as a female counterpart to the Hardys.
Read more about this topic: The Hardy Boys
Famous quotes containing the words creation of, creation and/or characters:
“We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.”
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“His leanings were strictly lyrical, descriptions of nature and emotions came to him with surprising facility, but on the other hand he had a lot of trouble with routine items, such as, for instance, the opening and closing of doors, or shaking hands when there were numerous characters in a room, and one person or two persons saluted many people.”
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