Let me put it this way: Naked Came the Stranger was an in-joke. As for the Tom Swift, Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew books, I refer to a passage in The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV shows 1946- Present, by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, page 437 (1995 edition):
“The Hardy Boys mystery books, on which this series was based, were supposedly written by ‘Franklin W. Dixon,’ but in fact there was no such person. They were actually the product of a remarkable [sic!] ‘writing factory’ founded in the early 1900s by Edward Stratemeyer, which was also responsible for the Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, Rover Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins series, and hundreds of other juvenile adventure best-sellers. Stratemeyer and his daughter Harriet Adams wrote or oversaw the writing of all of them, using more than 60 pseudonyms.”
This is not the same thing as an author protecting his identity by writing in another genre. This is corporate deception, pure and simple, and I hope that educators have refused to allow kids to submit book reports on these books, inasmuch as the putative author was a convenient fiction cooked up by the company’s founder. I cannot reconcile Stratemeyer’s intentions with the clause in the Constitution about copyrights.
Betty Crocker
The Quaker Oats man
YOU would be on very good ground in claiming that every person written about, mentioned, or guessed at before the year 1499 is fictitious. They didn’t exist: Before you start disputing this then please consider:
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The lack of writing skills, the unavailabilty of paper, the lack of permanent ink [ even modern inks fade] and the ‘lifespan’ of such articles when stored.
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You then had language translation difficulties. Mostly guesswork.
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And the tendency to exaggerate, to embroider, to confuse fact with fiction.
The real tragedy was the 11th / 13th Century Catholic Church’s policy to destroy all heathen writings. To rewrite all fables, to spread myths of great wondrous acts by biblical figures, and the creation of a surpreme being. It took about 200 years to cobble together the so called Chrisitian Word and teachings ** in short Jesus did not exist, nor did Judas, nor did any of the bible figures** And for 900 years it was forbidden [sometimes on pain of death] to even hint that all these religous personages and tales of derring do were untue and false.
TRUE-BRIT LEEDS ENGLAND .AUG 3 2004.
- See books on the History of Writing, the Life expectancy of paper and leather parchments, clay tablets, and inks and then bible myths*
How about Carl Lazlo, esq.
**dougie_monty ** how do you feel about these books? Just wondering if you think they fall into the same category as the Hardy Boys etc.
dougie_monty, am I being whooshed here?
It’s fairly easy to discover who actually wrote each of the Stratemeyer books, and who revised them in the 1960s (I think they’re being revised again now). How does one person writing a book with someone else’s name on it detract from the literary merit or entertainment value of the final product, outside of contract negotiations?
As a librarian, I can tell you that getting kids to read anything–dime store westerns and thrillers, serials, Sweet Valley High, comic books, bubblegum wrappers–is the goal. “Corporate deception” is held in such high regard that proper promotion and distribution of these materials is taught to future schoolteachers.
Syndicates are a godsend for a literary market thas has precious little to offer for people in the 5-12 age range. And where do you draw the line? What about R.L. Stine, a real person who writes every book for his monolithic corporate machine?
[/hijack]
I refuse to confess how educational this thread has been.
Pecos Bill, another American tall tale.
And on a similar note, did Montgomery Ward really invent Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?
~S&S
I always thought Gene Autry invented him.
There’s a character who did and did not exist; who is both demonstrably fictional and yet appeared in real life and whose appearance was not only well-documented but also predicted; a man of whom it can be said he was fictional in his own day, but real 100 years later; a man whom the British Library records show is fictional, and yet who has actually walked IN the British Library, been seen by people and even spoken to a librarian.
This character is Enoch Soames, who featured in a short story by Max Beerbohm written in the 1890s. In the story, Soames is offered the chance to travel 100 years into the future, to 1997, to visit the British Library. Sure enough, in 1997, he was actually seen in the Library:
Well, not prior to Lovecraft, anyhoo. But there’s still a nutjob or two who publish it regardless.
I read some of the Tom Swift Junior books in the early Sixties. (“I won’t pay the bill,” said Tom unremittingly.)
Perhaps literary merit is ignored–after all, how many people claim Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone else? (I know some people who claim Isaac Asimov did not write some books ascribed to him.) But it seem to me that the Founding Fathers–at least those among them who had that clause inserted into Congress’ powers in Article I–did not foresee such chicanery with authors’ identities. And if I were a parent buying boks for my kids I would think twice before choosing particular books if I had the merest inkling that the “byline” on the book cover was a lie.
First off, what the founding fathers wanted to do, as I recall from reading the Federalist Papers, was to provide economic incentives to increase intellectual property. Which is why the copyright clause is also linked to the patent clause. There is no legal or moral obligation for any work to have the author listed on the book cover. The legal and moral obligation is that the creator of the original work recieves compensation for the work, and the owner of the copyright, something that can be transferred to another person, or even a corporation is listed on the publisher’s information of the book. What happened with the Hardy Boys and other book series from the Stratemeyer mill resulted in just what the founding fathers wanted: economic prosperity for people involved in dealing with intellectual properties. Even the ‘first’ writer of the Hardy Boys books was satisfied with his treatment by the Stratemeyers, at the time. Later in life he felt that they were changing characters and formulae he’d created beyond where he wanted them to go, but that is very different from feeling that he’d been ill used economically.
Secondly, you still haven’t given me any reason why this prevarication in the search of profit is any different from when, for example, Nora Roberts submitted SF murder mysteries under the pen name J. D. Robb. It certainly seems less shady than some of the reports we’ve seen on this thread of the works of an individual author who created a whole new identidy to win a prize he’d already won before.
If the Stratemeyers had stolen the properties they published under the name Franklin W. Dixon, that would be one thing. But they didn’t. If they had sold a fraudulent product, a book like object with no text, or ‘All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy,’ throughout the text, that would be fraudulent. They didn’t do that either. If they’d published their books under the name of Agatha Christie, that might even be plagiarism, and fraud. They made the reputation that Franklin W. Dixon had, and protected it as one of their corporate assets - rightfully so.
Honestly, I really don’t see what the problem is. At the time that I read the Hardy Boys, I enjoyed them. They might even had gotten me into mystery fiction if they were published in paperback, and thus traded at the local used bookshop. 
Instead for the price of a single Hardy Boys book I could get several Heinlein’s, or Asimov’s. Heck, I once even picked up an L. Ron Hubbard, and if that’s not a corporate book syndicate, now, what is it? 
Just my opinion, of course. Worth exactly what you paid for it.
Rysler and Loach, thanks for letting me know I wasn’t the only one missing the point that dougie_monty is making.
And I thought of another man who didn’t exist, but was famous. Twice!
The Piltdown Man, and his even more fraudulent imposter made for P. T. Barnum.
Actually, Piltdown Man was “dug up” over twenty years after Barnum’s death. You’re thinking of the Cardiff Giant and the “fake of a fake” Phineas T. created.
As for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, he was the brainchild of Robert May, whose 1939 poem was written as a Christmas promotion for the Montgomery Ward store. Ten years later, Johnny Marks (May’s brother-in-law) based a song on Robert’s book, and Gene Autry recorded the tune, which quickly joined the canon of secular Christmas music.
Oops. :smack:
dougie_monty, what makes the use of a pseudonymn a lie, in your opinion (personal and legal). Did the publishers of the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, etc., engage in deception to convince the public that their “house names” were real individuals? If so, would your opinion of them be different if they hadn’t? Is a known pen name (like Mark Twain) a lie? What about Richard Bachman (which was invented to decieve both the public and the publisher)? Was J.K. Rowling being deceitful in using her initials in order to hide her sex (which she initially feared would prevent boys from buying her books)? If pen names are legitimate, can two people share one name? Three? May they take turns writing, or must they be equally involved in the construction of every sentence? What about Lemony Snicket, who is both the putative author of, and a character within the Series of Unfortunate Events books, actually written by Daniel Handler. What if the author’s actual name were kept secret? What if it were revealed only on the author’s website? What if clues pointing to the author’s true identity were hidden in the books, but the identity was not openly acknowledged? (This is actually the case with ASoUE, though the author does write the introduction to Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography under his own name.) Finally, would you buy your children any of the Straight Dope books, which (if I may break the illusion for a moment) were almost certainly written under a pseudonymn by at least three individuals, but which the publisher and current (primary?) author insist (perhaps humorously, perhaps not) were written soley by the named author?
I’m not asking these questions to mock you or poke holes in your position. I don’t know whether your argument has merit, because I’m not clear what it is. I hope you’ll elaborate.
Well, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there were twenty Tom Swift books written, all allegedly by Frank Dixon. And let’s say further that I had read all twenty of them when I was in seventh grade, and within a few weeks of the end of the school year I prepared a paper, sort of a composite book report about Tom Swift and the author.
Then I find out to my chagrin–as another person posting on this topic has suggested–that there was no Frank Dixon but a group of unnamed ghostwriters. Man, would I feel foolish! 
And I brought up the matter of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays for much the same purpose.
Should we distinguish between famous people who truly never existed, and people who existed, but bear little relation to the legends and myths that have grown up around them?
Saint Nicholas definitely did exist and was a bishop in the early Christian era. By a rather charming coincidence, the midieval Norse community on Greenland dedicated their cathedral to him. Saint Nicholas–Greenland–North Pole–get it?
Another person I think may well have existed was Noah, who prosaically built a raft and gathered his family, and some of his livestock, onto it, to escape the advancing Black Sea flood. Out of that grew the preposterous legends of worldwide floods with only a few of the most virtuous escaping.
Okay, then, how about brontosauruseses?
I’m still not sure what your point is. If I wrote a book report on A Series of Unfortunate Events or Tom Sawyer and failed to realize that Lemony Snicket or Mark Twain was a pen name, I’d be pretty embarassed as well. Are you suggesting that is what the Founding Fathers were trying to prevent? How considerate of them!
(BTW, if that was the most traumatic event of your childhood, you must be a remarkably well-adjusted adult.)
Which ignores all the millions of original documents that do survive from before 1499. Vellum and irongall ink has proved to be exceptionally durable.
The best specialists can read most medieval European languages and many ancient languages at least as well as most of those who originally wrote them.
A tendency that is no more prevalent in the rentals, court records, tax rolls, land transactions and all the other everyday documents that form the bulk of the archives that survive from the Middle Ages than in their modern counterparts.
You’ve fallen for the fallacy that in the Middle Ages they only wrote chronicles and hagiographies.
Actually, Macpherson didn’t invent Ossian, merely (most of?) the poems he attributed to someone who was already thought to be an historical figure. Not that the ‘historical’ Ossian need have been a real person either.
So you don’t think the fictitious names(s) were/was a brazen attempt to deceive the reader?
SHORT & SOUR: I saw a magazine cartoon, in the early Sixties, which said it all to me. Two people in a car–obviously Hollywood movie people (sunglasses, gaudy clothes, fancy sports car…). The woman drives; the man is reading a book. He says, “That Mark Twain is funny. He must have had some wonderful writers.”