Stratemeyer Unmasked

One of the most influential writers for young people, Edward Stratemeyer wrote or planned more juvenile fiction than any other writer of his time, yet he revealed very little of his own life. He was the Henry Ford of the series book; he adapted the assembly line technique to the production of popular literature. As much as G. A. Henty, he deserves the title of the children's Dumas. Unlike Dumas, he never wrote an autobiography, and, while he has been the subject of a number of books and articles, very little of a biographical nature has been attempted. The writers tend to introduce a few basic and indisputable facts and then, with varying degrees of nostalgia or literary criticism, proceed to discuss selected examples of what has come off the presses since the turn of the century that can be attributed to what has become known as the Stratemeyer Syndicate.

Let us be frank on one point: Deidre Johnson has written the best book to date on Stratemeyer and the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Her method has been to begin with a biographical sketch of Stratemeyer the man and extend it to include what is known about the founding of the syndicate and its operations following his death in 1930. She is objective, fair, dispassionate, and a thorough scholar in her presentation. She does not state anything that cannot be backed up by sources that she clearly identifies.

Following the biographical material presented in the opening chapter, she takes up Stratemeyer's own published works and the publications of the syndicate by categories and largely in a chronological sequence. Chapters two through eight cover his work in dime novels, career stories, travel stories, historical fiction, outdoor adventures, school stories, girls' series, tots' series, and mystery series. Chapter nine, the conclusion, reiterates her points while setting Stratemeyer's accomplishments into the broader context of the place of juvenile series books in the twentieth century.

At this point, one might ask: "What is so unique about that?" The answer lies in what she does with the material. She not only discusses each category and identifies the prevailing themes in the books and stories that Edward Stratemeyer himself wrote, but she also follows this up with examples from the major series produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate that she considers to have been based on the concepts of his earlier work. In this way she demonstrates that there was a unifying element in the Stratemeyer publications that was not apparent to the casual reader looking at the books in their rows on the shelves of the local book store.

Her discussion of Stratemeyer's dime novels is excellent. She considers them to follow two major strains, comic stories and adventure stories (further subdivided into mystery, western, and sports stories). Within these categories, she examines the characters, their standard traits, their vices, their use of humor, and the formulaic elements in the plots. She wisely notices that the heroes in Stratemeyer's dime novels are not really adults at all, but "man-boys—or adolescents in men's clothing," for their view of the world is that of the adolescent. To a certain extent, this can be said about the dime novels written by other writers as well; the paradigm she outlines might profitably be applied to an analysis of any long-running series where the hero is not concerned about the future but only about the current problem or the next stage in the current competition. It may serve to explain the high spirits of such intrepid man-hunters as Nick Carter or the fatalism of the bandit Deadwood Dick.

Johnson sees the career stories as the next step in the evolution of the Stratemeyer formula, when he abandoned the bohemian heroes of the dime novel and gained a foothold in the field of clothbound fiction for young people. Much of the Stratemeyer material in this area can be found in his continuations of some unfinished material by Horatio Alger and his serials for the major story papers of the day. The basic plot...