If you enjoyed the
Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder,
there’s a New
Yorker article about Wilder and her daughter,
Rose Wilder Lane.
I haven’t reread the books in a while, but here are some
thoughts that occur to me reading the article:
- I hadn’t remembered that the Ingalls family were illegal
settlers in Little House on the Prairie. - Part of the article is a survey of other literature about
the books. There’s a lot of material for research here, since
the original pencil-written legal pads on which Laura drafted
the books have been preserved. It’s not clear whether we have
the typewritten versions that Rose submitted for publication,
but apparently the scholars are assuming that most of the
differences between Laura’s drafts and the published versions
are Rose’s editing. It gives one little confidence in
literary scholarship as a whole that there the scholars who
have examined this material come to drastically different
conclusions about the extent of Rose’s contribution. Some of
them apparently believe that Rose was the real author, using
Laura’s drafts as raw material, and others believe, “Wilder
demonstrated a high degree of writing competence from the
beginning, and her daughter’s contribution to the
final products, while important, was less significant than has
been asserted.” (Quoted from John Miller in his introduction
to Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder. ) - Another big part of the article is the history of the Wilder
family reaction to twentieth century politics. They were
supportive of the William Jennings Bryan free silver
movement. Rose became a supporter of Eugene Debs, a
socialist, later flirted with communism, and after that
espoused what we now call libertarian principles, and in fact
may have been one of the first people to use that term. Laura was a
Democrat until the late 1920’s, but decided that the party was
committed to taking money from the farmers and giving it to
the urban poor, and was quite upset at the election of
Franklin Roosevelt. She believed (ignoring railroads, free
schools, and government-backed credit) that the Ingalls family
had accomplished what they had with no government assistence.
