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:
“The creation of “strong-minded” women, so-called, is due to the individualism of men, to the modern selfish and speculative spirit which absorbs everything within itself and leaves women nothing but self-assertion for their protection and support.”
—“Jennie June” Croly 1829–1901, U.S. founder of the woman’s club movement, journalist, author, editor. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 44 (February 1870)
“The creation of “strong-minded” women, so-called, is due to the individualism of men, to the modern selfish and speculative spirit which absorbs everything within itself and leaves women nothing but self-assertion for their protection and support.”
—“Jennie June” Croly 1829–1901, U.S. founder of the woman’s club movement, journalist, author, editor. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 44 (February 1870)
“I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)