A Wilder Rose: A Novel

Read A Wilder Rose: A Novel Storyline:

In 1928, Rose Wilder
Lane—world traveler, journalist, much-published magazine writer—returned
from an Albanian sojourn to her parents’ Ozark farm. Almanzo Wilder was
71, Laura 61, and Rose felt obligated to stay and help. To make life
easier, she built them a new home, while she and Helen Boylston
transformed the farmhouse into a rural writing retreat and filled it
with visiting New Yorkers. Rose sold magazine stories to pay the bills
for both households, and despite the subterranean tension between mother
and daughter, life seemed good.Then came the Crash. Rose’s
money vanished, the magazine market dried up, and the Depression
darkened the nation. That’s when Laura wrote her autobiography, “Pioneer
Girl,” the story of growing up in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, on the
Kansas prairie, and by the shores of Silver Lake. The rest—the eight
remarkable books that followed—is literary history.But it isn’t
the history we thought we knew. For the surprising truth is that Laura’s
stories were publishable only with Rose’s expert rewriting. Based on
Rose’s unpublished diaries and Laura’s letters, A Wilder Rose tells the
true story of the decade-long, intensive, and often troubled
collaboration that produced the Little House books—the collaboration
that Rose and Laura deliberately hid from their agent, editors,
reviewers, and readers.Why did the two women conceal their
writing partnership? What made them commit what amounts to one of the
longest-running deceptions in American literature? And what happened in
those years to change Rose from a left-leaning liberal to a passionate
Libertarian?In this impeccably researched novel and with a deep
insight into the book-writing business gained from her own experience as
an author and coauthor, Susan Wittig Albert follows the clues that take
us straight to the heart of this fascinating literary mystery.