In 1959 Harriet Adams re-wrote the story. She behaves charitably toward the impoverished heirs she helps, but is motivated by class and status, taking pleasure in the loss of status visited on the presumptive heirs by her actions. In this version of the story, Nancy is strong-willed, but also competitive. She breaks free and retrieves the clock while the burglars become drunk, an especially egregious offense in the era of prohibition. She is eventually imprisoned by burglars who stole the clock from the family home, unaware the will is hidden inside. With help along the way from her friend Helen Corning, Nancy learns the will is hidden in an old family clock. She is partly motivated by altruism, and partly by her dislike of the presumptive heirs who she sees as snobbish and nouveau-riche social climbers. In the original novel Nancy wants to help relatives of the recently-deceased Josiah Crowley by finding his will, which she believes will give them a claim to his estate. The characters and plot of the 1930 edition of The Secret of the Old Clock may be unfamiliar. At home, she lives with her father Carson Drew, an attorney, and their grandmotherly live-in housekeeper, Hannah Gruen. She investigates mysteries with her best friends Bess Marvin and George Fayne. Modern readers of the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories are most likely to have read the rewritten versions of the novels. We also know Mildred Wirt Benson authored or contributed to 23 of the original 30 Nancy Drew mysteries, including The Secret of the Old Clock. Today we know the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories were written and later revised by over a dozen men and women. In addition, authors were required to sign a contract in which they gave up any rights to the work, and maintained the fiction that the popular novels were written by a single person named Carolyn Keene. The book's title page names Carolyn Keene as its author, but the Stratemeyer Syndicate hired several writers to author the Nancy Drew books, paying them a flat fee. While many of the Nancy Drew novels, including The Secret of the Old Clock were re-written and re-released between 19, Special Collections & Archives holds a copy of the 1930 edition of the first book in the series. Now a best-selling work of children's literature, it is titled The Secret of the Old Clock, and is the first of dozens of novels featuring Nancy, her family, and her friends that make up the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. In 1930, a publishing company called the Stratemeyer Syndicate, working with Grosset & Dunlap, published a mystery novel featuring Nancy Drew, a teenage girl detective, as its protagonist.
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