1. An advertisement for the Motor Girls Series was included in every vol ume of the Dorothy Dale Series.

The authorship of most of these books is extremely difficult to trace, if not impossible. The Motor Girls Series and The Moving Picture Girls Series came from the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the leading purveyor of juvenile literature, but it is almost certain that Edward Stratemeyer did no more than outline a sketchy plot before assigning each volume to one of his stable of hack writers to be completed. Successful authors wrote under a number of pseudonyms, and a successful series, which might easily reach to over thirty volumes, often changed authors along the way. Nor is there much help to be found in publishers' records: in the early years of the series boom, it was not uncommon for firms like Grosset & Dunlap, Cupples & Leon, Henry Altemus, or A.L. Burt to buy the electroplates for a serial from a writers' syndicate without even reading the text, much less enquiring about the author: the histories of smaller companies like Barse & Hopkins or the Penn Publishing Company are even more obscure. What little research there has been into the writers of juvenile literature after Alger has concentrated almost entirely on the authors of books for boys: see “For It Was Indeed He,” Fortune, 9 (04 1934), 86 ffGoogle Scholar., and Nye, Russel B.'s “For It Was Indeed He: Books for the Young,” in The Unembarrassed Muse (New York: Dial, 1971).Google Scholar

2. Advertisement for The Automobile Girl Series, by Laura Dent Crane, printed in the back pages of Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School (1911)Google Scholar and in every subsequent volume of The Grace Harlowe Series published by the Henry Altemus Company.

3. Much of the initial success of the series depended on their appearance, the hard-cover, cloth-bound respectability that gained them entry to the middle-class homes that would never willingly harbor a luridly illustrated dime novel. Although the prices of the books varied from $1.50 to as low as 25 before settling at the half-dollar that was to become the norm, the physical format was uniform from publisher to publisher. The books were 7½ inches high and 5 inches wide (a bit smaller than the average adult novel of the period), and almost always had a large two-color illustration stamped on the front and another on the spine. Inside, the reader could expect approximately 250 pages of wide-margined, large-type adventure illustrated with a frontis piece and followed in the back of the book by several pages of advertisements for other series from the same publisher. Descriptions of other series were a distant lure, however, compared to the immediate promise that this particular series, with its unique and beloved set of chums, need not be abandoned at the final page: it was a rare novel that did not begin with a summary of preceding adventures and end with a broad hint as to the setting of the next volume of adventures.

4. Advertisement for the Range and Grange Hustlers Series, printed in the back pages of Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year of High School (1911).Google Scholar

5. The following passage from Grace Harlowe's Problem describes a fre quent subplot of the prewar serials. The mysterious Jean Brent arrives at college with trunks full of expensive clothes, but no money. After many trials, Jean reveals that she has run away from her guardian rather than be forced into marriage with a wealthy but spoiled young man. As the author explains, rather breathlessly, “Jean Brent's father and mother died when she was a child. She was brought up by an aunt who is very rich. This aunt gave her everything in the world she wanted but one thing. She would not allow Jean to go to college. She did not believe in higher education for girls. She believed that a young girl should learn French, music and deportment at a boarding school. Then when she was graduated she must marry and settle down.”

6. One small effort to keep up with the times was made in the Aunt Jane's Nieces Series, written by L. Frank Baum (author of The Wizard of Oz) under the name “Edith Van Dyne.” In the second edition (1918) of Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross, the ending was changed to record the fact that the war had ended.

7. The college girl had blossomed as a literary figure as early as the 1890s, although her presence did not intrude upon juvenile readers for another two decades. Sketches of college life like those in Abbé Carter Goodloe's College Girls (1895)Google Scholar, illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson, or Carolyn M. Fuller's Across the Campus (1899)Google Scholar had shown how becoming a mortarboard could be, and had demonstrated that the girl undergraduate could be just as pretty and marriageable, and often just as silly, as her stay-at-home debutante sister. By 1912, Jean Webster's enormously popular Daddy Long Legs had done much to intellectualize the image of the college girl, but nothing to reduce her charm. The almost universal assumption in prewar fiction that the jolliest and pret tiest of high school girls, as well as the smartest and the most ambitious, went to college, presents a striking contrast to later trends in juvenile literature, however. In 1950, when both the numbers of American women attending college and the proportion of the female population they represented had risen to almost six times the level of 1910, it was difficult to find a heroine who dreamed of Vassar, or even of State U. Apart from Beverly Gray, who did attend college, the great favorites of the 1950s were Nancy Drew, a perennial high school girl, Cherry Ames, who attended nursing school, and Vickie Barr, who dropped out of college to become an airline stewardess. Despite the emphasis on professionalism and its attendant glamor, the careers these heroines pursue are simply a continuation of the ageless female lot of nurtur ing and healing.

8. See Cady, Edwin H., “‘The Strenuous Life’ as a Theme in American Cultural History,” New Voices in American Studies, eds., Brown, Ray B., Winkleman, Donald, and Hayman, Allen (Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue Research Studies, 1966).Google Scholar

9. James, Henry, “The Portrait of a Lady,” in The Art of the Novel (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1934), pp. 48–49.Google Scholar