Laura Ingalls Wilder

[dirac]

An interesting article on Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the Little House on the Prairie books, and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane by Judith Thurman in The New Yorker.

By the time that Laura published her first book, Rose was a frumpish, middle-aged divorcée, who was tormented by rotten teeth and suffered from bouts of suicidal depression, which she diagnosed in her journal, with more insight than many doctors of the era, as a mental illness. For more than a decade, she had earned a good living with what she considered literary hack work for the San Francisco Bulletin, its rival, the Call, various magazines, and the Red Cross Publicity Bureau. She had published commercial fiction, travelogues, ghostwritten memoirs, and several celebrity biographies. Charles Ingalls’s granddaughter had inherited his wanderlust, and her career had given her a chance to indulge it. Much of her reporting had been filed from exotic places. She had lived among bohemians in Paris and Greenwich Village, Soviet peasants and revolutionaries, intellectuals in Weimar Berlin, survivors of the massacres in Armenia, Albanian rebels, and camel-drivers on the road to Baghdad.

In 1928, she had come home to Rocky Ridge for an extended visit with her aging parents, whose income she subsidized. They were so used to denying themselves basic comforts that they threatened to have their electricity cut off, even though they no longer needed to live so austerely, and Laura’s martyrdom, as Rose saw it, was a reproach to her own way of life.

[Latecat]

Dirac: I really enjoyed the article. Thanks for posting the link.

[dirac]

You're most welcome, Latecat. Thanks for posting. I grew up with the Little House books (wasn't a regular viewer of the television series) and followed the discussion over Rose's role in the writing of the book for awhile.

[canbelto]

I really enjoyed that article. I read all the Little House books when I was a kid and I think my favorite book of the series was The Long Winter.