Hired Pens: Professional Writers in America's Golden Age of Print

Ever wonder how Franklin W. Dixon or Carolyn Keene managed to churn out the hundreds of titles in their respective Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series? The answer is, they didn't. Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene were the noms de plume of a small army of anonymous writers-for-hire who produced a neverending stream of adventure tales aimed at young readers. In Hired Pens, author Ronald Weber explores the so-called golden age of print, a time when the market for fiction was huge and a wide range of writers from the nameless authors of the Hardy Boys books to the likes of Upton Sinclair could make a steady--and in some cases, handsome--living from their pens. Weber's book starts in the 1830s and ends in 1969; during the intervening decades, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens share the page with Zane Grey and Max Brand as Weber tells the sometimes glorious, often grubby story of mass-market publishing. For every author who made it big (Stowe, for example), there were plenty who didn't, and the book abounds with tales of poverty and suicide. Still, Weber's view of his subject is generally admiring, and Hired Pens offers some interesting insights into a time when writing could be wild, woolly, and sometimes even profitable.