THE STORY OF TWO WRITERS

One of the first books I truly loved as a child was was The Secret of the Old Clock, the opening volume in the Nancy Drew series. Eventually, like millions of young girls spanning three generations, I would consume all thirty titles. Even now the sight of the worn covers, or the yellowed pen and ink illustrations inside brings on a wave of childhood nostalgia. In an instant, I’m back in my narrow bed huddled beneath a blanket and a small circle of light. There are pink roses on the wallpaper, and my parents are long asleep. At that hour, it feels like there's no one in the world but me and Nancy Drew.

Soon after, I would linger beneath the covers with books like Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and The Secret Garden, but I first experienced the deep communion between reader and fictional character with the famous girl detective.

In concept, Nancy Drew was created by a millionaire book packager named Edward Stratemeyer, who paid a young journalist $125 a book for volumes 1 - 7. Eventually the price escalated to a whopping $500. But a strange thing happened between the concept and the final product: the writer created a real character, a spunky young heroine who triumphed over the dangers and the complexities of modern life with flair and intelligence. In doing so, she spoke to millions of girls as they prepared to navigate the most mysterious world of all: adolescence.

I guess there wasn't so much curiosity about authors at that time; I never wondered much about Carolyn Keene. Nor were her age, her photograph, or the size of her advances used to trump up sales. The packaging of Stratemeyer's series was limited to the books. It did not extend to the author.

Meanwhile, Mildred Wirt Benson, the woman who brought Nancy to life for $125 and wrote all the best books in the series, quietly went about her life--and kept typing. When she was finally recognized at age of eighty-five, Benson was revealed to be a person much like Nancy herself: a determined optimist who learned to fly a plane in her sixties, and would continue to write for Toledo Times until her death at ninety-six. She left behind more than 130 novels--most written under pseudonyms and for a fee. Benson harbored no illusions that her novels would endure for the ages; and when she was finally identified, she found the adulation of her fans a mixed blessing.

Kaavya Viswanathan, who has grown notorious for the plagiarized passages in her novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed...in the past week, seems to have struck a different kind of deal with her book packagers. It wasn't so much her writing skills they were after; it was her persona. Her status as a teen prodigy and student at Harvard was skillfully hyped to create buzz around the novel.

Until this week, Viswanathan seemed like the luckiest of writers. At seventeen, without ever agonizing over a single query letter or even needing to complete her novel, she secured a top notch agent and a half-million dollar publishing deal. Legions of talented writers who've spent years of their lives and a fortune in postage trying to attract the attention of the publishing industry, could only shake their heads in bemused frustration--or bitter envy.

Now everything has come into question-- from the the the exact nature of Viswanathan's authorship to the size of her advance. But the greatest question of all concerns the capricious nature of luck. Kaavya Viswananathan's novel may be reissued; and driven by its notoriety, it may sell even better than predicted. But it now seems that the grossly underpaid Mildred Wirt Benson, who spent most of her life in anonymity, may have gotten the better deal.