Eighteen-year-old Nancy Drew has been solving mysteries and inspiring generations of young readers for nearly a century. The only child of successful widowed lawyer Carson Drew, many readers have long seen Nancy as someone with an enviable amount of independence (and privilege). With housekeeper Hannah Gruen keeping things tidy at home, Nancy scurried about town in her blue roadster, solving mysteries with BFFs George and Bess or her boyfriend Ned Nickerson in tow. And let’s face it: Nancy’s red hair is probably the sole reason that a sizable number of Americans outside the field of art history can even name the sixteenth century Italian artist Titian. As author Melanie Rehak argues, Nancy is part of the “pantheon of American girlhood,” a source of inspiration since she first appeared. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, would-be readers looking for the latest book in the series at their local library often encountered an unexpected mystery: where was Nancy Drew?
Nancy Drew was created to be the wholesome girl detective next door, the product of American author and publisher Edward Stratemeyer, who had previously ghostwritten some of Horatio Alger’s final works. By the 1920s, his Stratemeyer Syndicate was developing multiple children’s book series, including The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, and Nancy Drew. The Syndicate provided outlines and story concepts, then handed those off to ghostwriters.1 Early Nancy Drew books sold well even during the Great Depression, and remained bestsellers well into the 1950s, even as sales figures for other series books flagged.2 So why were librarians keeping the detective off their shelves?3
The first step of solving any mystery is to look at the clues. The American Library Association (ALA) offers the top 3 reasons why books are challenged:
- “Sexually explicit” content
- “Offensive language”
- “Unsuited to any age group”
In the last few years in particular, book bans have been on the rise in the United States. PEN America identified bans on more than 1,600 titles in 32 states from July 2021 to June 2022. Many of these bans were the result of new and proposed laws, other political influence, or the nearly fifty parent and community groups actively seeking to remove and ban books from school and public libraries. PEN America notes that these book bans mainly targeted books featuring “protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color” or LGBTQ+ themes or characters.4 These reasons, as well as those identified by the ALA, suggest that contemporary book banners see their efforts as a way to protect impressionable young readers from what books might do to them. This perspective reduces a reader to little more than a tabula rasa, subject to the whims of a distant author who imposes their perspectives on unresisting minds.
But Nancy Drew is not on the list of books being targeted today. Even in the mid-twentieth century, anyone would have been hard-pressed to accuse Nancy Drew of the common concerns raised now.5 Instead, Nancy Drew books were banned because of the same approach to publishing that helped to make them so popular in the first place.
Nancy Drew books were part of a series, and librarians in the mid-twentieth century viewed series books as just plain bad. Critics of series books charged that such titles showcased bad writing, but even worse, stunted young readers’ minds. Rather than seeing young readers as passive minds, those keeping Nancy Drew books off the shelves saw reading as an active process in which readers played an important role in consuming texts. Series books like Nancy Drew were problematic because they were believed to limit readers’ active imaginations. Some librarians even saw series books as outright harmful for young readers, drawing them down a dark path that prevented them from exploring “better” literature. Today, librarians and educators would not see these as meaningful concerns; the current focus is on helping young readers find books they enjoy so they can develop a love of reading itself.
Like Nancy Drew readers in the mid-20th century, today’s young book lovers have found themselves trying to solve The Case of the Empty Bookshelves. Book banning, then and now, is fundamentally rooted in the premise that books have the power to shape people’s lives. A century ago, librarians kept Nancy Drew off the shelves because they did not want to stifle readers’ creativity and imaginative engagement. Today’s book banners believe that if they can keep people away from books, they can keep “the wrong ideas” from getting into readers’ minds—and society at large.
But their concerns suggest that they, too, know that a young reader’s mind is no passive receptacle. In the fall of 2022, the residents of Jamestown, Michigan, voted to eliminate funding for their library because librarians would not remove certain books. Some townspeople were upset about the inclusion of books with LGBTQ+ themes and characters, such as Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir. According to library director Matt Lawrence, “The concern from the public was that it’s [the inclusion of such books] going to confuse children.”6 Contemporary book banners fear exactly what mid century librarians claimed to celebrate: the enormous potential that comes with giving readers characters and stories that inspire them to ask questions or see the world differently.
While librarians once viewed the Nancy Drew books as morally suspect, in part for committing the crime of poor, formulaic writing, millions of readers saw Nancy differently. In the titian-haired girl detective, readers found an independent young woman who knew how to communicate with people, solve problems, take matters into her own hands, and make the world a better place through her hard work and skills. The transformative power of books–even series books like Nancy Drew—lies in the imagination and creativity readers bring with them to the things they read. The real mystery is: how do we help young readers find stories that will inspire them to make the world they want to live in one day?
- While all Nancy Drew books bear the author name Carolyn Keene, the truth was that several women authored the books, primarily Mildred Wirt Benson and Stratemeyer’s own daughter, Harriet Adams. To learn more about the women behind Nancy Drew, see Melanie Rehak, Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her (New York: Mariner Books, 2006).
- By the end of the 1950s, series books were becoming less popular, but Nancy Drew titles remained an exception to that trend: in 1959 alone, about 1.5 million Nancy Drew books were sold. Rehak, 242.
- Folklorist Maria Tatar notes that the series was not available in her hometown when she was young, and points out that the New York Public Library did not put Nancy Drew in circulation until 1971. Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1,001 Faces (Liveright, 2022), 210.
- Despite a clear effort to target books with these themes and characters, book banners often use language more in line with what the ALA sees. For instance, when a school district in Wentzville, Missouri, voted to remove Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye from its libraries, one board member argued that the book “had no academic value” and was a book with “nothing to offer for our children.” A month after the school board voted to remove The Bluest Eye, they reversed that decision, perhaps in part due to a lawsuit from the ACLU. They did not reverse their decisions to ban several other titles, however.
- While the books did initially include racist stereotypes and language, in the 1950s revisions to the early Nancy Drew titles addressed racism in the works. Rehak 246.
- Matthew Cantor, “US library defunded after refusing to censor LGBTQ authors: ‘We will not ban the books,’ The Guardian, 5 August 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/05/michigan-library-book-bans-lgbtq-authors?scrlybrkr=80981770.
