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frequently dropped by to ask him questions about his characters’ progress and when his next book would be out. Though he abhorred any kind of organized lecturing, he was always interested in the boys’ reactions to his work and considered them far and away his best critics. “I am afraid I shall have to decline your invitation to address your boys’ department,” he wrote at one point to the head of the Newark YWCA. “I am no public speaker, and have always declined to inflict myself on the public in that way. I am sorry that your committee of boys did not call upon me, for I am always glad to meet the boys, even though I do not feel equal to addressing them publicly. All my ‘talking,’ so to speak, is done through the medium of my books.” Even when newspapers and librarians disparaged his writing, he was content in the knowledge that the only constituency he cared about admired his work ardently and trusted him to be their guide. As he once implored a disagreeable editor: “Don’t take the heart out of a fellow when he is straining every nerve to the utmost to make every boy in these United States his warm friend.”
    The Newark neighborhood of Roseville, where the Stratemeyers lived, was an ideal place for him to come into contact with his fans, for it was filled with children. Boys could be found “on the block” at all times of day, playing baseball and marbles. There was no such thing as a playground, nor any need for one, as the area was still covered by “an endless stretch of vacant lots that seemed to the boyish eye as limitless as the Argentine pampas or the western prairies.” Though it was officially a part of the city of Newark, Roseville was fast becoming a tranquil antidote to the crowded, roaring downtown. The city had been purchased by New England Pilgrims from the Hackensack Indians in 1667, for the price of about $700, though no money had exchanged hands. The transaction read like nothing so much as a thrilling scene in a Stratemeyer story, payment having been made in the form of “fifty double hands of powder, one hundred bars of lead, twenty axes, twenty coats, ten guns, twenty pistols, ten kettles, ten swords, four blankets, four barrels of beer, ten pairs of breeches, fifty knives, twenty hoes, eight hundred and fifty fathoms of wampum, twenty ankers of liquors and ten troopers coats.”
    Since its Indian days, Newark had been transformed into the centerpiece of New Jersey industry. The downtown buzzed with factories that made plastic and forged iron, as well as numerous insurance companies, railroad depots, and thousands of immigrants from Germany, Poland, and Italy, among other places. By 1897, when Harriet was five years old, its population was roughly a quarter million people. But Roseville, just a few miles from the center of town, still showed signs of its recent transformation from farmland, and on its edges working farms remained. “Streets had been cut through lots that still showed ridges where the plow had tilled. Glacial boulders were commonplace. Houses were . . . few [and] swamps were at hand for exploration.”
    In spite of this, Roseville was not without a certain flair. One contemporary of Harriet’s, recalling the halcyon days of his youth, described how growing up there, one could count “the pleasure of city, suburbs, and country in his common experiences. He grew up with most of the sophistication of the city lad, but he knew cows, horses, farming and the freedom that alone can be found where no concentrated population has safeguarded itself with restrictions.” The neighborhood also boasted excellent schools. Roseville was a well-off, white, God-fearing community, a world apart from the working-class, predominantly foreign neighborhoods in other parts of the city.
    For upper-class girls like Harriet and Edna—Edward’s earnings and investments along with Lenna’s private