The Hardy Boys - Creation of Characters

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.