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life.”
    Edward was beginning to discover his love for basing tales of crime and derring-do on solid research. It was a practice he would come to refer to as the “difficult task to collect the material I want, a tedious study of reference books, biographies, works of travel and histories,” but that he nonetheless enjoyed and felt he owed his readers. He had held his much-heralded editorial job for only six months before being let go, and was once again writing full-time (Street & Smith had promised to continue using his stories on a regular basis). In 1895, after two years of writing stories, he left Street & Smith behind to become the editor of another short-lived story paper,
Young Sports of America.
    But the depression of the 1890s was in full force, brought on by a slowing of investment in the railroad, the main engine of economic expansion in the 1880s, and exacerbated by an agricultural crisis caused by indebted plains farmers and a long stretch of uncooperative weather conditions. It finally culminated in a stock market plunge in 1893, affecting everything from unemployment, which some estimates place as high as 18 percent by the middle of the decade, to advertising. Staying afloat in business, for Stratemeyer as for everyone else, was almost impossible. As one publisher wrote of his trials:
    Â 
Of all the deadly schemes for publishing, that of juvenile publishing is the worst. It is hopeless . . . for as the boys and girls mature they take adult periodicals. It is a question of building new all the while. Then again, the advertiser has no use for such mediums. He wants to talk to money-spenders—not dependents—not children.
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    Before too long, of course, it would be precisely the children whom advertisers and publishers wanted to reach, but for the time being, adults still held sole control over household purchases.
    Despite the grim business climate and the arrival of his second daughter, who joined her older sister on May 29, 1895, Edward decided in 1896 to bring out his own story paper. As part of his work for
Good News,
he had become acquainted with his boyhood heroes, William T. Adams and Horatio Alger. Alger, for one, found him to be “an enterprising man, and his stories are attractive and popular. Under favorable circumstances, I think he will win a fine reputation.” With Alger’s support, and some reprints of his stories to boot, Edward launched his masterpiece, which he christened with the marvelously optimistic name
Bright Days.
    Alas, even a man of such consistency as Stratemeyer could not make a success of
Bright Days
in the imperiled market. It soon became critical to adapt to changing conditions, chief among them the shift from magazines to books for children. Stratemeyer began to cast his eye on the emerging children’s book market, for which, with his instinct for both business and the passions of young people, he proved to have a knack. By the end of 1897, he had published twelve books in a series called Bound to Win. Soon thereafter he began what he called “an experiment in historical writing,” offering a book based on the Revolutionary War called
The Minute Boys of Lexington
to the very respectable Boston publishing company Estes & Lauriat. It sold well, and Edward wrote a second one,
The Minute Boys of Bunker Hill,
after which he abandoned the series.
    For in that same year, Stratemeyer struck his first juvenile storybook gold in a manner that would have thrilled his forty-niner father. The Spanish-American War was escalating, making publishers loath to take any risk at all as their sales slumped. As one editor told Stratemeyer in a letter, “The people do not seem to have the time to read anything but the newspapers at present.” Not one to be daunted, Stratemeyer decided that if Americans were interested in the news, they would be interested in fiction that was based on it. When Commodore Dewey defeated the Philippine-based