During those years, she reigned as one of the most highly recognized detective heroines in hardcover fiction.

Likely, you recall her adventures.

But did you know her alter — that is, her author — was a woman from Ladora, Iowa, named Mildred?

Barbara Lounsberry wants you to know that.

Lounsberry, herself a noted author of nonfiction and native Iowan, will present “Nancy Drew: Iowa’s Heroine To The World” on Saturday, September 16, in what will be the final presentation of the season in Mulberry Center Church at Wilson Brewer Historic Park.

The program begins at 1 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

In all those years that Nancy Drew’s adventures topped reading lists, the woman who breathed life into the best-selling books remained obscure.

She was born Mildred Augustine in 1905. Ladora, a farming community near Iowa City, but in Iowa County, had a population of 229 in the 2020 census, according to Carolynn Miller, who organizes the programs held at Mulberry Center during the warm months.

Then, Mildred Augustine met Edward Stratemeyer in New York. It was 1925. She began working for his syndicate as a writer who fleshed out his plot outlines for juvenile mystery stories, Miller said.

“In 1929, she began to write Stratemeyer’s Nancy Drew Mystery Stories for a reported $125 per book. In 1950, three years after her husband Asa Wirt died, she married George Benson, the editor of The Toledo Times, from which point her professional career was focused on newspaper writing.”

Miller said Mrs. Benson reportedly gained her first series book writing experience with Volumes 23 to 30 of the Ruth Fielding Series. She wrote 23 of the Nancy Drew books and several Dana Girls and Kay Tracey books, all for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Under her own name, she wrote many other series, such as the Brownie Scouts. Penny Nichols, Penny Parker, and the most unusual to carry the by-line of a woman writer, the six Dan Carter Cub Scouts books for boys.

“Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson wrote “The Secret of the Old Clock,” “The Hidden Staircase” and 23 other Nancy Drew mysteries, creating many of the character’s admirable qualities,” Miller said. “Like a true daughter of the midwest, Augustine wrote in the first Nancy Drew volume, “The Secret of the Old Clock,” published in 1930, “Nancy Drew took pride in the fertility of her state and saw beauty in a crop of waving green corn, as well as, in the rolling hills and the expanse of prairie land.”

The secret of the author’s identity was kept for more than 50 years.

Few people learned that she was from Iowa.

“It would be decades before most Nancy Drew fans learned that Benson was the original Carolyn Keene,” Miller said. “The Stratemeyers always kept authors’ identities under wraps, preferring to tell fans that the family wrote all the books.”

In the 1970s, researchers discovered Benson had been Carolyn Keene.

In the early 1990s, Benson donated a series of papers and her Underwood typewriter to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

And in 1993 the University of Iowa held a widely-publicized Nancy Drew Conference, after which Benson finally got the public credit and adulation she deserved. She was even named the “Person of the Week” by ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Miller said.

Benson told Jennings that she’d probably still be writing when the undertaker walked through the door. She was right — she was 96 and working in semi-retirement on a column for the Toledo Blade on May 28, 2002, when she died.

Miller said Mildred Augustine was herself a Nancy Drew-like figure. An academic pioneer — she was the first woman to earn a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism — Augustine earned six airplane pilot’s licenses and wrote 130 books for young people.

“Today she even outsells Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s venerable heroine,” Miller said.

More than 200 million copies of “Nancy Drew Mysteries” have been sold and she has been translated into 45 different languages.

Lounsberry, Saturday’s presenter, recently retired as a professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa.