Rose Wilder Lane
From Free net encyclopedia
Current revision
Image:RoseWilderLane01.jpg Rose Wilder Lane (December 5, 1886, De Smet, Dakota Territory – October 30, 1968, Danbury, Connecticut) was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist. Although her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder is now the better known writer, Lane's accomplishments remain remarkable. She is considered a seminal force behind the American Libertarian Party.
Contents |
Early life and schooling
Rose Wilder Lane was the first (and only surviving) child of Laura Elizabeth Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder. As a child, she moved with her parents to Minnesota, Florida, back to South Dakota and eventually to Mansfield, Missouri, where her parents established a farm. By all accounts a brilliant student, she attended high schools in Mansfield and Crowley, Louisiana (where her father's sister Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer had settled), graduating in 1904. Her intellect and ambition were demonstrated by her ability to compress three years of Latin into one, and by graduating at the top of her high school class. Despite this academic success, her parents' financial situation meant that college was out of reach.
Early career, marriage, divorce
Despite inheriting the pioneering spirit of her forebears, Lane was quickly drawn away from a rural lifestyle, and eventually spent much of her life traveling the world. After graduation, she returned to her parents' farm, assessed the limited options that a life in Mansfield could offer, then took matters into her own hands. She learned telegraphy at the Mansfield railroad station (the station master was the father of a school friend). Before long, she was working for Western Union in Kansas City as a telegrapher. She worked as a telegrapher in Missouri, Indiana and California for the next five years, until her marriage.
In 1909, she married salesman and occasional newspaperman Claire Gillette Lane. Around 1910, they had a son, but the baby was either stillborn or died shortly after birth. For the next few years, Lane led a somewhat vagabond existence, traveling around the US and working on various marketing and promotional schemes with her husband. Her writing career began around 1910, with occasional free-lance newspaper jobs. Beginning around 1912, Lane and her husband sold, over several years, millions of acres of farm land in what is now the San Jose/Silicon Valley area of northern California. Lane turned out to be the better salesman of the two, which contributed to several periods of separation and eventually a 1918 divorce. Lane never remarried, although she informally "adopted" and educated several young people throughout her life.
By 1915, the threat of war had weakened the real estate market, so Lane accepted a stopgap position as an editorial assistant on the staff of the San Francisco Bulletin. The stopgap turned into a watershed. She immediately caught the attention of her editors not only through her talents as a writer in her own right, but also as an extremely skillful editor for other writers. Before long, Rose Wilder Lane's photo and byline were running in the Bulletin daily. She easily churned out formulaic fiction that would run for weeks at a time, and captivated readers with multi-part human interest articles and biographical studies of the rich and famous. Her studies of Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Jack London and Herbert Hoover were published in book form.
Launches free-lance writing career
By 1918, Lane had sufficient confidence in her abilities to quit the Bulletin and launch a career as a free-lance writer. The late 1910s through the 1930s represented the peak of Lane's professional writing career. Her short stories and novels were often nominated for O. Henry Awards and other literary honors. Her work regularly appeared in leading publications such as Harper's, Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies' Home Journal, and was often anthologized. She was reputed to be one of the highest-paid women writers in America. Lane was generous to a fault with her friends and family, which often resulted in her quickly running through large amounts of money, with not much left to show for it. She also suffered periodic bouts of self-doubt and depression in mid-life, self-diagnosing herself as manic-depressive (now more commonly known as bipolar disorder).
Lane's work as a traveling war correspondent began with a stint with the American Red Cross Publicity Bureau in post-WWI Europe and continued though 1965, when at the age of 78, she was reporting from Vietnam for Woman's Day magazine, providing "a woman's point of view." During her Red Cross travels, Lane became enamored with Albania, and lived there for several long periods during the 1920s, spaced between sojourns to Paris and her parents' farm in Missouri. She informally adopted a young Albanian boy whom she claimed saved her life on a dangerous mountain trek, and later sponsored his education at Oxford University in England. After about 1928, Lane returned to the U.S., living on her parents' farm until about 1937, when she purchased a rural home outside of Danbury, Connecticut, where she spent the rest of her life.
A controversial collaboration
Controversy surrounds Lane's exact role in her mother's famous Little House on the Prairie series of books. A contributing factor was the stock market crash of 1929, which wiped out both Lane's and her parent's investments. The ensuing Great Depression further reduced the market for her own writing, and she found herself depressed and struggling to support herself, her adopted children and her elderly parents. When her mother approached her with a rough manuscript about her hardscrabble pioneer childhood, Lane's well-developed sense of what was marketable took notice. She saw that an American public weary of the Depression would respond eagerly to the story of the loving, self-sufficient and determined Ingalls family overcoming obstacles while maintaining their sense of independence, as told through the eyes of the spunky Laura.
Some argue that Wilder was an "untutored genius", relying on her daughter mainly for some early encouragement and established connections with publishers and literary agents. Others contend that Lane essentially took her mother's unpublishable 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 -- Wilder's writing career as a rural journalist and credible essayist began more than two decades before the Little House series, and Lane's formidable skills as an editor and sought-after ghostwriter are well-documented. The existing evidence (including ongoing correspondence between the women concerning the development of the series, Lane's extensive personal diaries, and Wilder's draft manuscripts) tends to reveal an ongoing joint collaboration that involved Lane more so in the earlier books, and to a much lesser extent by the time the series ended. Lane insisted to the end that she considered her role to be little more than that of an advisor, despite much documentation to the contrary.
One may conclude that the mother's strengths as a compelling storyteller, and the daughter's considerable skills in dramatic pacing, literary structure, and characterization, resulted in a sometimes tense yet remarkable collaboration between two talented women. In fact, the collaboration may have benefitted Lane as much as her mother - many of Lane's popular short stories and her two most commercially successful novels were written during this time. Let the Hurricane Roar (later retitled Young Pioneers) essentially retold the stories of her grandparents in an adult format. Free Land, also written for adults, (and loosely based on Laura and Almanzo's first four years of marriage) addressed the difficulties of homesteading, and how the "free land" in fact cost many homesteaders their life savings. The Saturday Evening Post later serialized the book. Regardless of Lane's actual involvement in the success of her mother's writings, both writers' careers were reinvigorated, enabling both of them to recoup their losses from the Depression.
Later years
After about 1940, despite continuing requests from editors for material, Lane turned away from fiction writing and became one of the more influential American libertarians of the middle 20th century. She vehemently opposed the New Deal, creeping socialism, and taxation, claiming she ceased writing highly-paid commercial fiction in order to avoid paying income taxes. She cut her expenses to the bare minumum, and lived a modern-day version of her ancestors' pioneer life on her rural acreage near Danbury, Connecticut. A staunch opponent of communism after seeing it practiced in the Soviet Union, she wrote The Discovery of Freedom (1943), and tirelessly promoted and wrote about individual freedom, and its impact on humanity. As Lane grew older, her political opinions solidified on the far-right side of conservative, and her defense of what she considered to be basic American principles of liberty and freedom could become harsh and abrasive in the face of disagreement.
During the 1960s, she revived her writing career by publishing several popular magazine series, including one about her tour of the Vietnam war zone. She wrote an immensely popular book about American needlework and also published "On The Way Home", to serve as a capstone to the Little House series. She also contributed book reviews to the influential William Volker Fund. She was the adoptive grandmother and mentor of Roger MacBride, the Libertarian Party's 1976 candidate for President of the United States. The last protoge to be taken under Lane's wing was the sister of her Vietnamese interpretor; impressed by the girl's intelligence, she brought her to the US and enrolled her in college.
Lane died in her sleep at the age of 81 on October 30, 1968, just as she was about to depart on a three-year world tour.
Quote
- "The longest lives are short; our work lasts longer".
Bibliography
- The Story of Art Smith (1915) (biography)
- Henry Ford's Own Story (1917) (biography)
- Diverging Roads (1919) (fiction)
- White Shadows on the South Seas (with Frederick O'Brien) (1919) (non-fiction travel)
- The Making of Herbert Hoover (1920) (biography)
- The Peaks of Shala (1923) (non-fiction travel)
- He Was A Man (1925) (fiction)
- Hillbilly (1925) (fiction)
- Cindy (1928) (fiction)
- Let the Hurricane Roar (1932) (fiction)
- Old Home Town (1935) (fiction)
- Give Me Liberty AKA Credo (1936) (political history)
- Free Land (1938) (fiction)
- The Discovery of Freedom (1943) (political history)
- "What Is This: The Gestapo?" (1943) (pamphlet)
- On the Way Home (1962) (biography/autobiography)
- The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework (1963)
About Lane
- Holtz, William V., 1995. The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane. University of Missouri Press. More.
- ------, ed., 1991. Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship Letters, 1921-1960. University of Missouri Press. More.
External links
- Cato Institute: Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968).de:Rose Wilder Lane