- This article is about Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author. There is an article on the aviator Laura Ingalls.
Laura Ingalls Wilder (February_7, 1867-February_10, 1957), was an American author. She authored the series of historical fiction books for children based on her childhood in a pioneer family. The most well-known of her books is Little House on the Prairie. Now, many people are familiar with the long-running television series of the same name.
Early Life and Marriage
Born Laura Elizabeth Ingalls near Pepin, Wisconsin, she and her family moved extensively throughout the mid-west during her childhood and adolescence, eventually settling in De Smet, Dakota Territory, where she attended school and worked as a seamstress before meeting and marrying Almanzo James Wilder (1857-1949) in 1885. She had two children: the novelist, journalist and political theorist Rose Wilder Lane(1886-1968) and an unnamed baby boy who died soon after his birth in 1889.
Laura was born to Charles and Caroline Ingalls. They had 4 girls: Mary, Laura, Caroline (Carrie), and Grace. Their son Charles Frederick (called Freddy) died as a baby. Mary later went blind and attended a school in Iowa. She never married. Carrie married David Swanzey, and had two stepchildren, Mary and Harold. She had no children of her own. Grace married Nathan Dow; the couple was childless.
In the late 1880s, a bout of diphtheria followed by a stroke left Almanzo partially disabled for the remainder of his life. This setback began a series of disastrous events that included the death of their unanmed infant son, the destruction of their home and barn by fire and several years of severe drought leaving them in debt, physically ill and unable to earn a living from their 320 acres (1.3 km²) of prairie land.
In about 1890, the Wilders left South Dakota and spent about a year living on Almanzo's parents' prosperous Minnesota farm, before moving briefly to Florida. The Florida climate was sought to improve Almanzo's health, but Laura, used to living on the dry plains, hated the southern humidity. They soon returned to De Smet, got special permission to start precocious Rose in school early, and took jobs (Almanzo as a day laborer, Laura at a dressmaker's shop) to save enough money to once again start up a farming operation.
Moves to Missouri
In 1894, the hard-pressed young couple relocated to Mansfield, Missouri, making a partial downpayment on a piece of property just outside town that they named Rocky Ridge Farm. What began as about 40 acres (0.2 km²) of uncleared hillside with a ramshackle log cabin, over the next 20 years, evolved into a 200 acre (0.8 km²), relatively prosperous poultry, dairy and fruit farm. The log cabin was eventually replaced with an impressive ten-room farmhouse.
The climb to financial security was a slow and halting process. Unable to eke out a subsistence living on the farm, the Wilders moved into nearby Mansfield in the late 1890s, where Almanzo found work as a oil salesman and delivery man. Laura took in boarders and served meals to local railroad workers. Their spare time was spent working at the farm and hoping for a better future.
Rose Wilder Lane grew into an intelligent, restless young woman who was not satisfied with the rural lifestyle her parents loved. She quickly surpassed the other students at the local Mansfield school and was sent to her aunt, Eliza Jane Wilder in Crowley, Louisiana to attend a more advanced high school. She graduated in 1904 and returned to Mansfield. She learned telegraphy and mastered Morse Code. Rose soon departed Mansfield for Kansas City, where she secured a job with Western Union as a telegraph operator. A remarkable transformation occurred in the ensuing years, and Rose Wilder Lane became a well-known, if not famous, literary figure of her day. She was the most famous person to hail from Mansfield, Missouri, until Laura Ingalls Wilder began to publish her "Little House" Books in the 1930s.
Newspaper Editor, Loan Officer, Poultry Farmer
Meanwhile, in about 1910, Rocky Ridge Farm was established to the point where Laura and Almanzo returned to living there and focused their efforts on increasing the farm's productivity and output. Laura, always active in various clubs and regional farm associations, was recognized as an authority in poultry farming and rural living, which led to invitations to speak to groups around the region. Following Rose's developing writing career also inspired her to do some writing of her own. An invitation to submit an article to the Missouri Ruralist in 1911 led to a permanent position as an columnist and editor with that publication -- a position she held until the mid-1920s. She also took a paid position with a Farm Loan Association, managing small loans to local farmers from her office in the farmhouse. Her column in the Ruralist, "As a Farm Woman Thinks", introduced Mrs. A.J. Wilder to a loyal audience of rural Ozarkians, who enjoyed the columns, which ranged in topic from home and family, WWI and other world events, to the fascinating world travels of her daughter and her own thoughts on the increasing options being offered to women during this era.
While the Wilders were never rich until the Little House series of books began to achieve popularity, the farm operation and Laura's income from her outside activities provided a stable enough living for the Wilders to firmly place themselves in Mansfield middle-class society. Laura's fellow clubwomen were mostly the wives of business owners, doctors and lawyers, and her activities took up much of the time that Rose was encouraging her to use to develop a writing career for national mangazines, as Rose was doing. Laura seemed unable or unwilling to make the leap from writing for the Missouri Ruralist to these higher-paying national markets. The few articles she was able to sell on a national level were heavily edited by Rose and placed through Rose's publishing connections.
Retirement Looms
During much of the 1920s and 30s, between her long sojourns abroad, Rose lived with her parents at Rocky Ridge Farm, increasingly assuming responsibility for her parents' financial support as her income increased and her aging parents scaled back their farming operation. Rose took over the farmhouse her parents had built and had a beautiful, modern stone cottage built for her parents on the grounds. She bought them their first automobile and taught them both how to drive. Around 1928, Laura ceased her writing for the Missouri Ruralist and resigned from her position with the Farm Loan Association. A worry-free retirement seemed impossible for Laura and Almanzo when the Stock Market Crash of 1929 wiped out the savings of both Rose and her parents (Laura and Almanzo had invested most of their hard-won savings with Rose's broker). In 1930, Laura approached her daughter with a manuscript she had written about her pioneering childhood. The recent deaths of her mother and sister Mary seem to have prompted her to preserve her memories in a "life story" called "Pioneer Girl". Little did she know a whole new career was about to begin for her.
New Career/Daughter's Role in Series
Controversy surrounds Rose's exact role in what became her mother's famous "Little House" series of books. Some argue that Laura was an "untutored genius," relying on her daughter mainly for some early encouragement and her connections with publishers and literary agents. Others contend that Rose basically took each of her mother's unpolished rough drafts in hand and completely (and silently) transformed them into the series of books we know today. The truth most likely lies somewhere between these two positions -- Laura's writing career as a rural journalist and credible essayist began more than two decades before the "Little House" series, and Rose's formidable skills as an editor and ghostwriter are well-documented.
The existing evidence (including ongoing correspondence between the women concerning the development of series, Rose's extensive personal diaries and Laura's draft manuscripts) tends to reveal an ongoing joint collaboration. The conclusion can be drawn that Laura's strengths as a compelling storyteller and Rose's considerable skills in dramatic pacing and literary structure contributed to an occasionally tense, but fruitful collaboration between two talented and headstrong women. In fact, the collaboration seems to have worked both ways: two of Rose's most successful novels, Let the Hurricane Roar (1932) and Free Land (1938), were written at the same time as the "Little House" series and basically re-told Ingalls and Wilder family tales, but in an adult format. The collaboration also brought the two writers at Rocky Ridge Farm the financial resources they both needed to recoup the loss of their investments in the stock market.
It's also suspected that Rose's Libertarian tendencies influenced the books' strong theme of self-reliance. (See [1] (http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=3478).)
Whatever the collaboration personally represented to Laura and Rose was never publicly discussed, but by the mid-1930s the royalities from the "Little House" books brought a steady and increasingly substantial income to the Wilders for the first time in their 50 years of marriage. Various honors, huge amounts of fan mail and other accolades were granted to Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the "Little House" series. Also, the novels and other publications of Rose Wilder Lane during the 1930s represented her creative and literary peak. The Saturday Evening Post paid her $30,000 (approximately $400,000 in today's dollars) to serialize her best-selling novel Free Land, while Let the Hurricane Roar saw an increasing and steady sale, augmented by a radio dramatization starring Helen Hayes, and has steadily remained in print even today as Young Pioneers.
Celebrated Author
Rose left Rocky Ridge Farm in the late 1930s, moving to Danbury, Connecticut. She eventually ceased fiction writing and spent the remainder of her life writing about and promoting her philosophies of personal freedom and liberty. She became one of the more influential American libertarians of the middle 20th century. Laura and Almanzo were frequently alone at Rocky Ridge Farm. They lived quietly and independently until Almanzo's death in 1949, at the age of 92. Laura was devastated but determined to remain independent. For the next several years, she did just that, looked after by a circle of neighbors and friends who found it hard to believe their very own "Mrs. Wilder" was a world-famous author.
During the 1950s, Rose often came back to Missouri to spend the winter with Laura. In the fall of 1956, she found her 89 year old mother severely ill from diabetes and a weak heart. Several weeks in a hospital seemed to improve the situation somewhat, but on February 10, 1957, three days after her 90th birthday, Laura Ingalls Wilder died.
Rose inherited ownership of the literary estate for her lifetime only, all rights reverting to the Mansfield library after her death. This included copyrights and royalties from the Little House books, and after her death in 1968, her heir Roger MacBride, gained control of the copyrights through a practice called bumping the will. Controversy came after MacBride's death in 1995, when the Laura Ingalls Wilder Branch of the Wright County Library (which Laura helped found)in Mansfield, Missouri, decided it was worth trying to recover the rights. The ensuing court case was settled in an undisclosed manner, but MacBride's heirs retained the rights. The library received enough to start work on a new building.
The popularity of the Little House series of books has grown phenomenally over the years, spawning a multi-million dollar franchise of mass merchandising, additonal spinoff book series and the long-running television show.
Laura once said the reason she wrote her autobiograpy in the first place was to preserve the stories of her childhood for today's children, to help them to understand how much America had changed during her lifetime.
Bibliography
- Little House in the Big Woods (1932)
- Farmer Boy (1933) - about her husband's childhood on a farm in New York
- Little House on the Prairie (1935), a Newbery Honor book
- On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), a Newbery Honor book
- By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939),a Newbery Honor book
- The Long Winter (1940), a Newbery Honor book
- Little Town on the Prairie (1941), a Newbery Honor book
- These Happy Golden Years (1943), a Newbery Honor book
- On the Way Home (1962, published posthumously) - a diary of the family's move from De Smet to Mansfield, Missouri, and was edited and added to by Rose Wilder Lane.
- The First Four Years (1971, published posthumously)
- West From Home (1974, published posthumously) - letters to Almanzo from Laura on her visit to daughter Rose in San Francisco in 1915.
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