In early editions, she is depicted as a mere servant later in the series, she becomes more of a family member. The Drews reside in River Heights and employ a housekeeper, Hannah Gruen. Her father, Carson Drew, is a well-known criminal defense lawyer. Nancy Drew is a sixteen-year-old high school graduate (her age was changed to eighteen in the 1959 rewrite). It was first published on April 28, 1930, and rewritten in 1959 by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. She is survived by her daughter, Peggy Wirt.The Secret of the Old Clock is the first volume in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series written under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. She married twice, and her husbands died in 19. She was in the office the day after being diagnosed with lung cancer. She flew aeroplanes into her 80s and also remained a keen swimmer as well as regularly going into her office to write the column, On the Go With Millie Benson and Millie Benson's Notebook. When she attended the first Nancy Drew convention in 1993, she was reported to have told a friend: 'I'm so sick of Nancy Drew I could vomit.' She wrote 130 books in her career, including the Penny Parker mystery series. He gave her the outlines of the plots and she wrote most of the books, with other authors also writing under the Carolyn Keene name. She was commissioned to bring Nancy Drew to life by publisher Edward Stratemeyer, who also created the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins and the Tom Swift series.

She had started writing stories at school and won her first writing award at 14 before getting a master's degree in journalism from the University of Iowa in 1927. Wirt Benson was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1997.

I'm glad that I had that much influence on people.' 'I just never expected it to be the blockbuster that it has been.

'I always knew the series would be successful,' Wirt Benson said in December. The character has been continued and modernised, and the books have now sold more than 200 million books in 17 languages. It was a ground-breaking character at the time, inspiring readers that anything was possible and proving that not all action heroes were male. Nancy Drew was a bold and adventurous role model for girls at a time when many struggled for independence. Wirt Benson died in hospital in Toledo, Ohio, after being taken ill in the newspaper office where she still wrote a column. She wrote under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, and was behind 23 of the original 30 Nancy Drew books, which were first published in 1930. Mildred Wirt Benson, the woman who wrote the original stories about teenage detective Nancy Drew, has died aged 96.

Nancy drew author carolyn