A Wilder Rose: A Novel

by Susan Wittig Albert

  In 1945, she moved from the Courier to the National Economic Council’s Review of Books, where she wrote monthly book reviews through 1951. One of her reviews, a detailed and hostile reading of a 1947 Keynesian college economics textbook by Lorie Tarshis of Stanford University, earned her considerable attention in the academic world.

  A lifelong letter writer, Rose continued to explore her political philosophies through correspondence. From 1946 to 1968, she carried on a correspondence with Jasper Crane, a DuPont vice president. The first of Rose’s letters (January 26, 1946) is typical: “You’ll find that I don’t ‘pitch into’ anyone; I am much more appalling than that; I actually say what I honestly think. It seems to me that the time is a little too late for anything else.” Twenty years and hundreds of letters later, she was still at it: “It isn’t money that moves the world,” she wrote to Crane in 1966. “It is faith, conviction, ardor, fanaticism in action.” Wild Rose.

  She continued to say what she honestly thought as a teacher at Robert LeFevre’s Freedom School, created to educate people about the nature and meaning of freedom and free-market economic policy. When she arrived in late 1958, she found that the school was about to close: it owed fifteen hundred dollars on its mortgage and was out of money. As it happened, she had sixteen hundred dollars in her checking account. She wrote the check, and Freedom School survived and thrived. It, and the people she met there, would become her community of friends and correspondents through the rest of her life.

  Over the years, Rose’s family changed. John Turner broke with her completely in 1939, and Rose, to her great sadness, never saw him again. She would have been comforted, though, if she had known what he made of the start she had given him. He enlisted in the Coast Guard at the start of the war and was promoted to lieutenant commander, completed three engineering degrees, and went on to a successful career. Al Turner also became an engineer and went to work for McDonnell Douglas. Rexh Meta was imprisoned during the war but was released at war’s end and went on living quietly in Albania, keeping in touch with Rose when he could. His daughter, Borë-Rose, and her children would later immigrate to the United States, with the help of another of Rose’s protégés, Roger MacBride. Mr. Bunting’s place was filled (although not the hole he had left in her heart) by two Maltese terriers named Jonathan Edwards and Henry David Thoreau, and when they were gone, other Maltese carried on.

  Norma Lee Browning and her husband, Russell Ogg, would continue in Rose’s orbit for the rest of her life, traveling with her and keeping up a regular correspondence. A talented and persistent writer, Norma Lee became a much-published investigative journalist for the Chicago Tribune. She also did her share of ghostwriting, even though Rose told her that she was too good a writer for that kind of work and advised against getting involved with ghost work and collaborations. Russell became a well-known freelance photographer and collaborated with his wife on several book projects.

  The most important addition to Rose’s extended family was her “adopted grandson,” Roger MacBride, the son of a Reader’s Digest editor. They met in 1943, when Roger was fourteen, and became deeply attached. MacBride went to Princeton and Harvard Law and was awarded a Fulbright in the early 1950s. He would go on to serve as Rose’s attorney, agent, trustee, and close personal friend. He also carried on her political agenda, becoming the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in 1976. He was on the ballot in thirty-two states, but won no electoral votes.

  Rose’s decade-long friendship with Helen (Troub) Boylston seems not to have been renewed after Troub left Rocky Ridge. While Rose was an inveterate letter-saver, all trace of their correspondence has vanished. Helen continued to be employed as a nurse, but, left to her own devices (and needing money), she put her writing skills to work. In 1936, she published the first book in a series called Sue Barton, Nurse. The seven books in that series have sold millions of copies and stayed continuously in print. In 1941, she began a four-book series featuring a young actress, Carol Page. Helen also wrote a young adult biography of Civil War nurse and founder of the American Red Cross, Clara Barton.

  Rose’s parents lived comfortably on the ever-increasing royalties from the books and the income from the sale of the Rock House and other pieces of Rocky Ridge Farm. As the years went on, Laura may have begun to feel somewhat conscience-stricken about those royalties. In July 1949, she wrote to George Bye, assigning a 10 percent share of the royalties to Rose “for helping me, at first, in selling my books and for the publicity she gave them”—a stunning understatement, apparently designed to continue the literary deception by deflecting Bye’s suspicion that Rose was more deeply involved in the books’ authorship.

  In Mansfield, others were puzzled by Laura’s apparent literary prowess emerging unexpectedly so late in life. Stephen W. Hines, who collected her Ruralist articles, interviewed a number of the Wilders’ fellow townspeople, who professed themselves bewildered by Mrs. Wilder’s unexpected achievements. It took Mansfield several decades, he says, to “become reconciled to Mrs. Wilder’s latter-day fame as a famous storyteller.”

  Almanzo’s life appears not to have been touched by his wife’s celebrity. He was generally thought “aloof” by his neighbors (as was Laura), was remembered as a hard worker who was at his best with cows and horses, liked a good cigar, and enjoyed a game of pool. He worked in his tool shop, read the newspaper and an occasional book, shared his wife’s and daughter’s strong political views, and told Rose that his life had been mostly “disappointments.” He died at the age of ninety-two in 1949.

  After Almanzo’s death, Laura continued to live at Rocky Ridge, which the Wilders had sold on a lifetime lease. Rose visited for a week or two at a time, usually in the winter, when her mother, who was diabetic, needed more help. In late 1956, she arrived to find her mother delirious. She was hospitalized, then returned home, with Rose and several local women as her nurse.

  “I am indeed frantically busy,” Rose wrote to Jasper Crane on January 20, 1957. “No help of any kind is available here, and I am houseworking, nursing, cooking and figuring out diabetic diet at high speed all day long . . . She is holding her own and perhaps gaining a little strength. I wish she would stay with me in Danbury but of course I understand her attachment to her home.”

  And it was in her home that Mama Bess died, with her daughter beside her, on February 10, 1957, just three days past her ninetieth birthday. She was buried next to Almanzo in the Mansfield cemetery. Several friends formed a nonprofit organization to repurchase the house and grounds and create a permanent museum. After initially objecting that the books should be her mother’s memorial, Rose endorsed the project and contributed the money to acquire the land, build a curator’s house, and fund the maintenance.

  Rose lived for eleven years past her mother’s death. She wrote an introduction and conclusion to the journal Laura kept of the trip from De Smet to Mansfield in 1894. The book was published as On the Way Home in 1962. She continued to be active, engaged, and energetic in her expression of her political beliefs, and she was interested in many things.

  Needlework had always been a major interest in her life, and in the 1960s, she wrote a series of articles about American needlework for Woman’s Day, based on pieces she had written in 1941–1942. The articles were collected in a book, Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework, published in 1963. In it, Rose tells the story of American women’s needle arts, turning the tale into a political narrative. She ends the introduction to the book with the fanciful story of Betsy Ross sewing the American flag, which stands, she says, for the inalienable liberty and human rights of every person. Bravely optimistic, she concludes that the flag will someday help “banish the last tyranny” and “free all mankind.”

  It was in that same spirit of patriotic optimism that Rose accepted another assignment from Woman’s Day. The magazine sent her as a correspondent to Vietnam in July 1965, when she was seventy-eight years old. Her article, “August in Viet Nam,�
�� was published in December 1965. She had just celebrated her seventy-ninth birthday.

  In the last few years of her life, Rose traveled with friends around the United States. She found someone to live in her Danbury home and bought a house on Woodland Drive in Harlingen, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. She began to think of traveling abroad and planned a trip to Europe and beyond. Intending to sail from New York on November 9, 1968, she went back to Danbury to prepare for the trip. She baked several loaves of bread, went upstairs to bed, and died in the night. She was eighty-two.

  But death did not end the what-belongs-to-whom controversy. Rose had been the beneficiary of her mother’s estate—at eighty-eight thousand dollars, a sizeable one—including annual royalty payments on the books. But Mama Bess had assigned the copyrights and the income they produced to her daughter only for Rose’s lifetime. At Rose’s death, they were to go to the Mansfield Public Library. Rose, however, had renewed the six expiring copyrights in Roger MacBride’s name. She left her entire estate to him, and as additional copyrights expired, he renewed them in his own name. After MacBride’s death, the library sued for the copyrights to the two books still in Laura’s name. The claim was reportedly settled for $875,000.

  The nature of the mother-daughter collaboration has been the subject of scholarly debate since the 1970s, when Rosa Ann Moore and William Anderson published articles examining the discrepancies between the manuscripts and the early books and speculating that Rose had a significant hand in their production. William Holtz’s biography, The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane, published in 1993, argued that Rose was essentially the ghostwriter behind the scenes. It was met with a great deal of vocal opposition by fans of the series and the later TV shows, who resisted the idea that their heroine might be involved with a literary deception.

  I don’t think it began that way, though. I think Laura simply believed Rose’s assurances that the books were hers and that her daughter was doing nothing more than any good editor would have done. Laura may have been initially uneasy with this explanation, but she was isolated from the literary community and had no experience of authorship against which to test what her daughter told her. From this point of view, she was operating out of a naive and simplistic understanding of the full dimensions and responsibilities of authorship and an eager acceptance of the unexpected prestige (Laura’s word for what she wanted) that came with being an “author.” I admit, however, that this explanation doesn’t fully account for Laura’s participation in the elaborate concealment of the collaboration from her agent and editors. At some point, I think, she must have recognized that this was an unusual arrangement, to say the least.

  It’s easier to understand the situation from Rose’s point of view, especially with a careful reading of her journal. She undertook to “fix” and market the material that became Little House in the Big Woods primarily in order to gain some writing income for her mother. She did whatever it took to get the first book published without considering the possibility of future books. Once it became clear that there would be additional books, she might have requested a jacket acknowledgment of her contributions, but that would mean backtracking on claims she had made to agents Carl Brandt and George Bye and editor Marion Fiery. If she had known that she was obligating herself to eight books, and that those eight books would go on to make literary history—and a great deal of money—it might have been a different story. We might remember, though, that the largest sums of money didn’t arrive until after Roger MacBride helped to produce the long-running television adaptation of Little House on the Prairie and worked with Harper to produce innumerable spinoffs, as well as dolls and toys. It was Rose who turned her mother into an author, but it was Roger MacBride who turned Laura Ingalls Wilder into a brand.

  It’s difficult and perhaps even painful to dismantle a long-standing myth, especially one in which the heroine is as lively and authentic-seeming as the young Laura and as sweetly ladylike and decorous as the older Laura. But whatever we have learned in the past few decades about the real circumstances of authorship, the books themselves remain exactly what they were when you and I read them for the first time and fell in love with Laura, her sisters, and her resourceful mother and father. Rose and Laura’s stories are a continuing testament to the strength, resilience, and courage of American pioneers and to our enduring belief in what it means to be an American.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a very special debt of gratitude to William Holtz, whose masterful biography of Rose, The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane, established the factual basis on which my fiction is built. I am grateful, as well, for the published work of many other scholars, notably that of John E. Miller, William Anderson, Anita Fellman, Ann Romines, Janet Spaeth, Stephen W. Hines, and Nancy Cleaveland (whose “Pioneer Girl” website has inspired many readers to further research). Additionally, William Anderson and John E. Miller made careful notes on the manuscript and generously shared both their advice and their knowledge of Wilder/Lane history.

  Thanks, too, to the patient and helpful archivists at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and at the State Historical Society of Missouri, who helped me assemble copies of the documents on which I relied, and to Kerry Sparks at the Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency for her enthusiastic support and her help in putting this book in the hands of readers.

  And of course to Bill Albert, again and always.

  HISTORICAL PEOPLE*

  Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968, RWL), only surviving child of Laura and Almanzo Wilder. Author of Let the Hurricane Roar (1932), Free Land (1938), The Discovery of Freedom (1943), and other fiction and nonfiction; unacknowledged coauthor (with her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder) of the Little House series.

  Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957, LIW), daughter of Charles and Caroline Ingalls. Author of articles for the Missouri Ruralist and other farm publications; coauthor (with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane) of the Little House children’s books. Called “Bessie” by her husband, “Mama Bess” by Rose.

  Almanzo Wilder (1857–1949), married (1885) to LIW. Known for his farming skills and horsemanship. Called “Manly” by LIW.

  Eliza Jane (Aunt E.J.) Wilder Thayer, Almanzo’s sister. Invited RWL to live with her in Crowley, Louisiana, and attend high school.

  Ethel Burney, Rose’s Mansfield friend from youth until her death; married Paul Cooley.

  Rexh Meta, the Albanian boy whom RWL met in 1921 and adopted informally. She sponsored his education in Tirana and at Cambridge University and helped to support his family through the rest of her life.

  John Turner, Rose’s second informally adopted son. She cared for and supported him from 1933 to 1939.

  Al Turner, John’s brother. Rose’s third informally adopted son.

  Helen (Troub) Boylston (1895–1984), RWL’s friend, travel companion, roommate, and confidante. Author of the young adult series Sue Barton, Nurse (1936–1952) and Carol Page, Actress (1941–1946).

  Norma Lee Browning (1915–2001), close friend and confidante of RWL from 1936 until Rose’s death. Born in Missouri and educated at the University of Missouri and Radcliffe. Award-winning Chicago Tribune feature writer and columnist for thirty years, author of more than a dozen books. Married (1937) to Russell Ogg, who became a well-known newspaper photographer.

  Carl Brandt, RWL’s literary agent, 1920–1930.

  George Bye, literary agent for RWL and LIW after 1930. His client list also included Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, and Frank Buck.

  George Q. Palmer, New York stockbroker for RWL, LIW, and Helen Boylston.

  Genevieve Parkhurst, friend and occasional guest of RWL at Rocky Ridge. Pictorial Review editor.

  Catharine Brody, friend and frequent guest of RWL, author of several bestselling novels in the 1930s, including Nobody Starves, Cash Item, and West of Fifth.

  Mary Margaret McBride, friend of R
WL, later a famous radio talk-show host. Rose stayed often in New York City with McBride and Stella Karn.

  Berta Hader, friend of RWL, children’s book illustrator. Berta introduced Marion Fiery to Rose to promote “When Grandma Was a Little Girl.”

  Marion Fiery, editor and head of the children’s book department at Knopf, who first (1930) agreed to publish “When Grandma Was a Little Girl” (the material that became Little House in the Big Woods).

  Virginia Kirkus, director, Harper Books for Boys and Girls, who agreed (1931) to publish “When Grandma Was a Little Girl” after Fiery left Knopf.

  Ida Louise Raymond, Harper Books for Boys and Girls, who oversaw the production of the Little House series.

  Adelaide Neall, Saturday Evening Post fiction editor, with whom Rose worked on her stories in that magazine.

  Garet Garrett, anti–New Deal critic, Saturday Evening Post leading political writer, close friend of RWL after 1935.

  *The names of most of the Wilders’ neighbors and friends have been altered to protect their privacy.

  FOR FURTHER READING