7 Famous Writers Who May Not Have Actually Existed

6. Carolyn Keene

You may not have heard of Carolyn Keene, but you've almost certainly heard of her series of children's books, the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. Since their first publication in the year 1930, the series has become wildly successful, selling at least eighty million copies around the world and being translated into over forty-five languages. Pretty good going, right? Carolyn Keene must have been extremely wealthy. Well, maybe she would have been had she actually been real. As it transpires, Keene hasn't been writing the Nancy Drew series in a long, long time. It makes sense, though, seeing how the series is still going over eighty years later. Yet it turns out that Carolyn Keene may never been writing the series in the first place. Over the years the Nancy Drew series has been written be countless ghost-writers, who upon trying to reveal their identities have been firmly denied by the series' publisher Edward Stratemeyer as having any part in the whole thing Stratemeyer has also threatened various people with legal action over such claims. In fact, the company has been so vehemently secretive about the whole thing that it's difficult to know whether someone named Carolyn Keene ever actually existed. Was she inspiration for the pseudonym? Did she start the series off and then quit, agreeing to lend her name to the series only? The truth we may never know.