Ohioana About Ohio or an Ohioan Book Award: 2006
Melanie Rehak for Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her
Harcourt 2005
 According to the Melanie Rehak,
it was Nancy Drew’s “Ohio” connection that drew her to writing about the teen detective with the blue roadster:
“I heard an obituary of Mildred Wirt Benson, the series’ first ghost writer, on the radio when she died in 2002.
As I listened to the announcer talking about her I got fascinated, since I had read the books voraciously as a kid . . . When I realized that Mildred was
Carolyn Keene . . . I started searching for more information.”
It was no surprise to Rehak that Benson, for many years the lone woman reporter at the Toledo Blade,
would create a determined, tough-minded, and independent Nancy Drew. Rehak, like Benson, is a writer whose work has appeared in the
New York Times Magazine, Vogue, the Nation, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review.
She has held fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Under Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her: Harcourt website
;
| 
