Her role in important series like The Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift Jr. Harriet Adams was eventually recognized around the world as the real Carolyn Keene. She herself wrote the story outlines for Nancy Drew books numbers 19 through 23, and she wrote books number 24 through 58 in their entirety. In 1942, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams assumed full control of the Stratemeyer Writing Syndicate, which she ran from offices in New Jersey for the next forty years (until her death in 1982 at the age of eighty-nine). This series continued intermittently until 1979. The Dana Girls book series, about two sister detectives, was introduced by Harriet and Edna in 1934, also under the penname Carolyn Keene. They sent them to ghostwriters, but maintained exclusive control over their stories and final published manuscripts.

The sisters wrote detailed chapter-by-chapter plot outlines for the next fifteen Nancy Drew adventures, as well as outlines for their father's other successful series. His two daughters Harriet, age 37, and Edna, age 35, then formed a partnership to continue their father's writing empire. Two weeks after Stratemeyer's death in May 1930, the first Nancy Drew books were published by Grosset and Dunlap. She was an independent, clever young woman who solved complicated mysteries, with the occasional help of two female friends. The character of Nancy Drew represented a new phenomenon in juvenile literature. Stratemeyer himself wrote the first three plot outlines, including detailed character profiles, while hired ghostwriters fleshed out the finished texts. In the late 1920s, Edward Stratemeyer, the founder of the Stratemeyer Writing Syndicate, a producer of juvenile SERIES BOOKS (including The Rover Boys, The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, and The Bobbsey Twins), created the penname Carolyn Keene, which was to be the name of the author of a new series based on a teenage heroine named Nancy Drew. Carolyn Keene was the pseudonymous author of the Nancy Drew and Dana Girls series of juvenile mystery books about young girl detectives.

Carolyn keene author