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Harriet, through and through. On her eighty-third birthday, the staff of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which she had been running for forty-five years by then, wrote a song to commemorate the events of her life. It included these lyrics, to be sung to the tune of “Mary, Mary,” concerning the infamous incident: “Born without a middle name, / we found out you took one secretly! / For it was Margaret, Margaret—/ That’s the name I chose for me. I could have chosen Sue or Mary Lou / or Marjorie / But it was Margaret, Margaret—/ That’s the name I tried to claim. / But Daddy said, ‘No dice. / That’s just not nice.’”
    Some of Harriet’s boisterousness was tempered by Lenna’s ever-present medical problems, which often dominated the family’s lives and necessitated quiet in the house. So, as one might expect of any child expected to avoid creating a disturbance, not to mention the child of a storybook writer, Harriet spent a great deal of time reading. She was enamored in particular of Dickens, whose humor she admired along with his clever uses of the coincidence as a plot twist, and of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
To a sheltered, privileged child, these stories offered at least secondhand experience of the kind of challenges and thrills she did not encounter in her own world. Harriet’s was a gentle, innocent childhood, but in her adult life she reflected that she had not always been happy to be so protected. She felt a certain kinship to Nancy Drew, she thought, because the girl detective was “what I would have liked to have been at her age.” (Of course, as Nancy Drew, Harriet would have only had to give up the restrictions on her freedom, not money, nice clothes, a car, or a devoted relationship with her father.) On one occasion, when a reporter was present, she couldn’t help revealing her regret about the restraints put on her by society and family in her childhood and adolescence. “A couple of hours with the spritely, curly-haired author . . . and a visitor realizes that Nancy Drew leads the kind of life that Adams would like to have lived instead of the more traditional early twentieth-century upper-middle-class life that was her lot. ‘Oh I would have loved to be a teenage detective and solved all mysteries,’ Adams says wistfully.”
    Still, Harriet developed into a bright, headstrong girl. She attended the public school in Roseville, where she did well but had a tendency to jump to conclusions. One day in second grade, her teacher asked the class if anyone knew what a furlough was. Harriet raised her hand immediately, sure she knew the answer. “A donkey,” she said. With a look of consternation, her teacher asked why she thought this was the right answer. Harriet replied: “I saw a picture of a soldier riding through the woods. Under it was the title ‘Jim going home on a furlough.’”

    W HILE HIS DAUGHTERS were busy growing up, Edward, too, was maturing. In the years following Harriet’s birth, he wrote at a rate that seems almost unimaginable. Between May of 1892 and November of 1893, he produced forty-two dime novels, and that same year he published his first book under his own name, with an apposite subtitle, to say the least.
Richard Dare’s Venture; or,
Striking Out for Himself
was originally a serial that had appeared in
Argosy.
A classic tale of a boy who makes good by using his wits and working hard, the book was beloved from its first appearance, leading Stratemeyer to thank his audience in a subsequent edition: “The author had hoped that it would receive some notice; but he was hardly prepared for the warm reception which readers and critics alike all over the country accorded it. For this enthusiasm he is profoundly grateful. The street scenes in New York have been particularly commended; the author would add that these are not fictitious, but are taken from