Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 19 -- The Stratemeyer Boys Club Serials
Boys Club lost world fiction (a larger grouping than underground adventures, but closely akin and
well cataloged by modern scholars) exploded in the late 1800s, an era when invention and global
exploration promised great scientific advancement. Every boy wanted to become a part of it.
Boys Club fiction of recent vintage is often set in such places as Machu Picchu, the Congo or the
Himalayas to couch the tale in nostalgic pastiche.
Of the 1500 books of the genre involving lost worlds, some 200 can be identified by title or
summary as being set underground. An exhaustive read would be required to enumerate how
many of these 200 subterranean worlds include riverine watercourses, but the proportion would
be high. They are "worlds," after all, and as we will come to see, authors of juvenile fiction tend to
transport that with which we are familiar to their more exotic geographies.
Below are a few 1935 cover illustrations showing underground waters.
Joseph O'Neill
Land Under England (1935)
John B. Harris
The Secret People (1935)
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Louis Herrman
In the Sealed Cave (1935)
This and the following three chapters will take brief looks at a large number of Boys Club
adventures involving underground rivers. We'll begin with the works of one particular publishing
operation that chronicled copyrighted Boys Club heroes over more-or-less the same terrain,
volume after volume. We'll then look at similar serials spawned elsewhere. Then we'll mention a
number of Boys Club books written in more of a stand-alone manner. And then we'll deal with
stories written for the biggest Boys Club of all, the Boy Scouts.
That's a lot of Boys Club literature, but we'd not properly appreciate underground rivers without
such a broad foundation.
Girls Club underground river literature is a shorter topic, only a chapter's worth in total.
The Stratemeyer Syndicate
The Stratemeyer Syndicate, a book-packaging firm of juvenile literature founded by in 1905 by
Edward Stratemeyer, is best remembered for producing the Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, Nancy
Drew, Rover Boys and Tom Swift series.
The syndicate produced over 1200 books in 125 separate series under some 100 pseudonyms.
One person wrote an outline for a story or series of stories, another wrote the story itself, and
often another refined the work.
Series production was overseen by Stratemeyer until his death in 1930, and the rights to all its
series were sold to Simon and Schuster in 1984.
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