The Stratemeyer Syndicate: 27 Books From the Fiction Factory, Free Online
Carolyn Keene never existed. Neither did Victor Appleton, Franklin W. Dixon, Laura Lee Hope, Margaret Penrose, Allen Chapman, Alice B. Emerson or Annie Roe Carr. They were house names belonging to the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and behind every one of them was the same arrangement: Edward Stratemeyer wrote a three-page outline, mailed it to a freelancer, paid between $75 and $150 flat with no royalty and no credit, edited what came back, and published it under a name the Syndicate owned.
It worked on a scale nothing in children's publishing had matched. Stratemeyer ran something like 125 series and over 1,300 books, and by the 1920s his output was large enough that librarians organised against it — the Boy Scouts' own librarian put the Syndicate's series on a disapproved list, which mostly taught the Syndicate that boys buy what librarians dislike.
Twenty-seven syndicate books are in the free library. Reading them next to each other is the interesting part, because the machinery is visible: the same chapter-ending cliffhanger, the same three-friend cast, the same trick of naming a volume after a place so the next one can be somewhere else.
Edward Stratemeyer under his own name
Before the Syndicate he was its most productive writer, and the Rover Boys was the series that paid for everything after it — six million copies, and the template every later series was cut from.
- The Rover Boys on the Farm — the last days at Putnam Hall, which makes it the hinge of the series: the school books end here and the travel books start.
- The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle
- The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch — the second generation of Rovers, out west.
- The Rover Boys on a Hunt — written during the First World War, and the war is in it.
- Dave Porter and His Rivals — the Rover Boys formula moved to a different school, which is exactly what it is.
- The Young Oarsmen of Lakeview — early, and a good look at him before the formula hardened.
- The Young Bridge-Tender — Stratemeyer writing Horatio Alger, deliberately. He finished several of Alger's manuscripts after Alger died, and this is the same idea done from scratch.
- American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt — nonfiction, and the odd one out. Roosevelt as a series hero, written while he was president.
Victor Appleton, who was Howard Garis mostly
Tom Swift is the Syndicate's science series: a teenage inventor, one machine per volume, and a plot that exists to demonstrate the machine. The early ones were largely written by Howard Garis, who also wrote Uncle Wiggily on his own time.
- Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship (1915) — an armed airship, two years before America entered the war. The series was an arms catalogue before it was anything else.
- Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders — a lost-city expedition, which is the series borrowing from the adventure shelf.
- Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope — much later and much shorter, from the run of cheap small-format editions. Useful for seeing what the series had shrunk to.
- The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast — the same house name doing early Hollywood. Two boys with a camera, and it is more interesting on the technology than on the plot.
Allen Chapman
- The Radio Boys at the Sending Station and The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice — 1922, at the exact moment broadcast radio arrived in American homes. The Syndicate could turn a series around inside a year of a technology existing, and this is the proof.
- Fred Fenton on the Crew and Fred Fenton on the Track — one sport per volume, which is the whole design.
The girls' series, which sold better
Stratemeyer worked out earlier than his competitors that girls bought series books at least as reliably as boys, and the Syndicate's girls' series are the direct ancestors of Nancy Drew.
- Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies, Ruth Fielding Down East and Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence — the best of the girls' series and the most unusual: Ruth starts as an orphan at a mill, goes to school, and then becomes a screenwriter and film producer running her own company. A heroine with a career was not standard equipment in 1915.
- Dorothy Dale: A Girl of Today — the first of its series, and Dorothy runs her widowed father's small-town newspaper.
- The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay — same house name, and the series exists because cars were new and girls driving them was faintly scandalous.
- Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach — boarding school plus a holiday destination, the two things the Syndicate knew how to sell at once.
The ones aimed younger
- The Curlytops on Star Island, The Curlytops and Their Pets and The Curlytops and Their Playmates — Howard Garis under his own name, writing for readers about six. Nothing bad happens, which is the point.
- The Boy Scouts of Lenox and Darry the Life Saver — Frank V. Webster, the house name used for shorter, cheaper books sold at a lower price point than the rest.
Which to actually read
If you read one, read a Ruth Fielding — they are the ones with a real character arc across the series, and the film-industry volumes are genuinely odd and specific. If you want to see the machine at its purest, read The Radio Boys at the Sending Station and count how many chapters end on a noise nobody can explain. If you want the historically important one, The Rover Boys on the Farm is the series that made all of it possible.
What is not here yet is Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys — both are still in copyright in their revised form, and even the 1930s originals are not on the free shelves. The Syndicate outlived Stratemeyer by decades: his daughter Harriet Adams ran it until 1982, and she is the reason Nancy Drew stayed in print.
All of it is free
Every book above is public domain and readable in the browser here, with nothing to install and no account needed to start. By name: Edward Stratemeyer, Victor Appleton, Allen Chapman, Alice B. Emerson, Margaret Penrose and Howard Roger Garis.
By shelf: 37 adventure stories for younger readers, 12 boarding-school novels and 16 detective and mystery stories. For the generation of series books just before the Syndicate, our Horatio Alger guide covers the writer Stratemeyer learned it from, and the boarding school stories list has the school half of the genre.