The University of Iowa, first in the nation to offer advanced degrees for creative writing and home of the famed Iowa Writer's Workshop, has a long history of turning out many of America's best-known authors. However, one of the most popular and enduring novelists ever to have graduated from the Ul is hardly a household name. Mildred Wirt Benson, under the much more familiar pseudonym Carolyn Keene, wrote the first 23 Nancy Drew mystery novels. The longest-running juvenile fiction series ever, the series has sold over 200 million books, received translation into 25 languages, and inspired adaptation for numerous film and television versions. In 2007, staff of the Ul's Digital Library Services department embarked on a digitization project to provide clues to the mysterious author behind the beloved Nancy Drew character. The Mildred Wirt Benson Papers, donated by the author in 1994 before her death almost a decade later, is one of the most in-demand collections at the Ul's Iowa Women's Archives. With Nancy Drew's status as an iconic figure in American popular culture, the materials have been consulted by scholars of women's history, children's literature and American studies, as well as by many of the teen sleuth's more ardent fans. To better serve patrons both locally and worldwide, and to save on handling of the fragile original items, the Libraries decided to digitize the Benson papers, along with rare and unique related materials in the Ul's SDecial Collections.
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