The Little House Books: Rose-Colored Classics

Abstract

The Little House Books:Rose-Colored Classics Rosa Ann Moore (bio) As a middle-aged English teacher, awash among freshman compositions, splintered by faculty duties, graduate study, and domesticity, I once looked forward with hope to retirement at age sixty-five when I, like Laura Ingalls Wilder, would have the chance at last to sit down, take a breath, and turn out my long-delayed creative masterpiece which would bring to the gate of the poultry farm where I grew up in Virginia hordes of readers singing my praises. But now I do not think that they will sing to me. For I have spent the summer among the papers and places of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and with people whose lives crossed hers, and I have learned that the story of her books is much different from what I once thought, or from what is commonly believed by most of her readers. My first work examining her revisions put me in some awe of the remarkably critical and subtle editing which had taken place. 1 I clung to the illusion of Mrs. Wilder's naive artistry even after Donald Zochert, in the writing of his biography Laura (Henry Regnery, 1976), came across material which indicated what the facts were. I am indebted to him for the initial suggestion that there was evidence which might eventually be released and settle the question that had puzzled me: could the difference between the manuscripts and the finally published books be accounted for by Laura's own artistic control, or by the masterful editing of someone else? I am grateful to readers of my article whose similar questions and intentions to study Mrs. Wilder themselves indicated that the time to build whatever bibliographical foundations could be based on that evidence, if it might be had, was now. In the summer of 1976 I put this situation to the heir of Rose Wilder Lane and executor of her estate, Roger Lea MacBride. In late winter, after rest and recuperation from the campaign in which he was the Libertarian candidate for President of the United States, Mr. MacBride granted me permission to study those papers in his possession which were pertinent to my query and to prepare a catalog of them for publication. This work is well under way; when it is complete he plans to deposit the papers in the manuscripts [End Page 7] Click for larger view View full resolution Laura Ingalls Wilder Photographs courtesy of Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum, Mansfield, Missouri. Click for larger view View full resolution Rose Wilder Lane Photographs courtesy of Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum, Mansfield, Missouri. [End Page 8] division of the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia where they will be accessible to others who wish to study them. Mr. MacBride extended every courtesy to me and gave me a free hand to do with the papers as I thought fit. During the Summer, 1976, supported by a research grant from the University of Chattanooga Foundation, I spent three weeks in Charlottesville, working in his office at sorting, assembling, ordering, and describing the jumbled contents of a brown corrugated file box—packets assembled in rubber bands, stuffed into envelopes, filed in crumbly folders. The experience was both personally and professionally exciting and, I believe important. It is to some of my findings and their implications for the creation of the Little House books that I should like to introduce you now. I arranged the papers first in what I believe to be a fairly accurate chronological order and then in topical order, and placed them in file folders numbered I through XXXV. These cover a range from personal letters between members of the family to manuscripts and childhood recollections from Aunt Martha (Laura's Ma's sister). But the letters between Laura (and occasionally, her husband Almanzo Wilder) and their daughter Rose Wilder Lane, a real estate woman, journalist, and novelist, are the most significant to us, for they develop two interwrapped and inseparable strands that have a crucial bearing on the writing of the Little House books. One of these strands is the consciousness of the pressing need for money, the other...