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Sturdy, Don. Don Sturdy was created by “Victor Appleton,” the pseudonym of Howard R. Garis (Tom Cardiff, Larry Dexter, Sherman Ford, Dick Hamilton, Amos Henderson, Professor Jephtha Jonkin, Motion Picture Chums, Moving Picture Boys, Mystery Boys (I), Nat Ridley, Rocket Riders, Smith Brothers, Tom Swift, Teddy (II), Venture Boys), and appeared in the fifteen-book “Don Sturdy” series, beginning with Don Sturdy on the Desert of Mystery, or, Autoing in the Land of Caravans (1925) and concluding with Don Sturdy with the Harpoon Hunters, or, the Strange Cruise of the Whaling Ship (1935).

Don Sturdy is a teenaged boy from Hillville, a suburb fifty miles outside of New York City. He is the son of Richard Sturdy, an eminent explorer, but when the Sturdys go missing while sailing around Cape Horn Don is cared for by his two bachelor uncles, Frank and Amos. Captain Frank Sturdy is an internationally-known big-game hunter who harvests animals for the International Museum and Menagerie Collection Corporation. Professor Amos Regor Bruce is a "famous scientist and archaeologist, whose delight lay in collecting and studying relics of old and dead civilizations." Both of Don's uncles travel extensively, and Don always gets to go with them, traveling to far-off and exciting destinations and getting into the most enjoyable situations, along with Don's best pal, Teddy "Brick" Allison.

Don usually wears his riding breeches, cavalry boots, and pith hat, no matter where he is. He is a master of woodcraft and could shoot, with accuracy, any gun known to man or woman. Capturing poisonous snakes and digging for accursed mummies mean nothing to him, nor does taking on bandits and cannibals. Don discovers the City of Brass and the Cave of Emeralds in the depths of the Sahara; with his father he finds the Tombs of Gold in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings; he hunts polar bears at the North Pole, explores the volcanic Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes in Alaska, travels through the Sargasso Sea, fights head hunters in Borneo, discovers a strange race of giants in Patagonia, sea serpents and devil fish under the Pacific, and finds a Lost Race Mayan city, with bloodthirsty natives, in Central America.

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