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 Laura Ingalls Wilder
and Rose Wilder Lane

Authorship, Place, Time, and Culture

John E. Miller

University of Missouri Press

Columbia
Copyright © 2008 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65211
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
First paperback printing, 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miller, John E., 1945 –
Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane : authorship, place, time, and
culture / John E. Miller.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “One of America’s leading authorities on Laura Ingalls Wilder
and Rose Wilder Lane combines analyses of both women to explore their
collaborative process and how their books reflect the authors’ view of place,
time, and culture, expanding the critical discussion of Wilder and Lane
beyond the Little House”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-8262-2076-9
ISBN 978-0-8262-2076-9 (alk.
(alk. paper)
paper)
1. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957— Criticism and interpretation.
2. Lane, Rose Wilder, 1886 –1968 — Criticism and interpretation.
3. Authorship— Collaboration. 4. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957.
Little house on the prairie. 5. Historical fiction, American—History
and criticism. 6. Autobiographical fiction, American—History and
criticism. 7. Frontier and pioneer life in literature. 8. Frontier and
pioneer life —United States. I. Title.
PS3545.I342Z7695 2008
813.52—dc22
2008028185

ø™ This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard

for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Designer: Jennifer Cropp

Typefaces: Palatino and Garamond

Jacket photo of Rose Wilder Lane courtesy of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Home Association, Mansfield, Missouri.

Jacket photo of Laura Ingalls Wilder courtesy of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Memorial Society, De Smet, South Dakota.

Jacket background art © Zsolt Biczó / Dreamstime.com

To Paul W. Glad, whose dedication to the historical craft
and whose wise and generous counsel have served as a model
and inspiration for me and countless other students.
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1. Writing the Self: Approaching the Biographies

of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane 1

I. Authorship: Who Wrote the Books? 19

2. The Mother-Daughter Collaboration That

Produced the Little House Series 23

II. Place: What Attracted Wilder and

Lane to Little Houses? 43

3. The Place of “Little Houses” in the Lives

and Imaginations of Laura Ingalls Wilder
and Rose Wilder Lane 47

III. Time: What Does History Teach? 71

4. A Perspective from 1932, the Year Wilder

Published Her First Little House Book 75
 viii Contents

5. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frederick Jackson

Turner, and the Enduring Myth of the Frontier 94

6. Rose Wilder Lane and Thomas Hart Benton:

A Turn toward History during the 1930s 110

IV. Culture: How Should People Live,

and How Should Society Function? 137

7. Wilder’s Apprenticeship as a Farm Journalist 141

8. “They Should Know When They’re Licked”:

American Indians in Wilder’s Fiction 159

9. Frontier Nostalgia and Conservative Ideology

in the Writings of Wilder and Lane 180

Notes 211
Bibliography 233
Index 255
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 Acknowledgments

A book like this cannot be written without the kind assistance

and support of many people. I would like to thank generous and
unstinting archivists and librarians at the Herbert Hoover Presi-
dential Library, South Dakota State University, the University of
Wisconsin, the University of Missouri, the National Archives, the
State Historical Society of Missouri, the South Dakota State Histor-
ical Society, and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Special
thanks also to the staff at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Soci-
ety in De Smet, South Dakota, and at the Laura Ingalls Wilder
Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri. I also wish to thank the
Little House Heritage Trust for its assistance and encouragement in
making available the Rose Wilder Lane papers at the Hoover Pres-
idential Library.
I am grateful for the penetrating comments and advice of Gary
Kass, for the careful editorial assistance of Jane Lago and Julianna
Schroeder, and for the helpful suggestions made by three anony-
mous readers at the University of Missouri Press. They have made
this book immeasurably better than it was in the beginning. I am
particularly grateful to Bill Anderson and Dwight Miller, who were
generous and astute in answering my questions and helping me
think through my ideas about Wilder and Lane. To every other per-
son and organization providing assistance to me, I extend my heart-
felt gratitude.
For permission to revise and expand essays that became chapters

ix
 x Acknowledgments

4, 6, 7, and 8 of the book, I thank the following publications in which

they originally appeared:
“Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Perspective from 1932, the Year of Publi-
cation of Her First ‘Little House’ Book,” Big Muddy: A Journal of the
Mississippi River Valley 2, no. 1 (2002): 38 – 54.
“Rose Wilder Lane and Thomas Hart Benton: A Turn toward His-
tory during the 1930s,” American Studies 37, no. 2 (fall 1996): 83–101.
“Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Apprenticeship as a Farm Author,” Papers
of the Twenty-sixth Annual Dakota History Conference, ed. Arthur R.
Huseboe and Harry F. Thompson, 481–88. Sioux Falls, S.D.: Center
for Western Studies, 1994.
“American Indians in the Fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” South
Dakota History 30, no. 3 (fall 2000): 303–20.
 Laura Ingalls Wilder
and Rose Wilder Lane
 1

Writing the Self

Approaching the Biographies of

Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

When I told a friend of mine that I was writing another book about
Laura Ingalls Wilder, a surprised expression came over her face.
“What?” she asked wonderingly. “Is there anything else we need to
know about her?” I tried to explain to her what it was I was planning
to do, but I wonder now whether what I told her sounded very con-
vincing. That there is plenty of room for further study of one of the
twentieth century’s most popular children’s authors, however, is a
given. Adding to that is the success of her daughter, Rose Wilder
Lane, as a novelist, short-story writer, and literary journalist and her
crucial assistance to Wilder in the production of her Little House
novels. As I argue in the next chapter, future studies of Wilder’s lit-
erary output will have to be conducted with full recognition of the
close collaboration that occurred between mother and daughter in
the writing of the books, and therefore it makes eminent sense to
treat the two in tandem, which is what I have done in this book.
Although Lane had worked previously with her mother on sever-
al writing projects and had attempted to tutor her in the writing of

1
 2 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

articles for national magazines, it was only in 1930 that an intense

collaboration began between the two as they set to work to produce
autobiographical novels of the frontier aimed at children’s audi-
ences. Wilder’s original autobiography, “Pioneer Girl,” never found
a publisher, but it served as a resource for seven of the eight Little
House books, which appeared regularly between 1932 and 1943
(Farmer Boy, the second in the series, was based upon the boyhood
experiences of Wilder’s husband). The decade of the thirties, which
witnessed the publication of Wilder’s first five books as well as of
Lane’s two most important novels, was a time of tremendous social,
political, and cultural ferment and conflict, and most of the chapters
in this book grapple with issues emerging out of this creative and
conflicted environment.
Lane not only collaborated with her mother on the texts of all of
the Little House books, but also actually lived at Rocky Ridge farm
in a house just a few hundred yards away from her parents until the
middle of 1935. While the two were in essential agreement in their
views about politics, which found expression to varying degrees in
the books of both, they frequently found themselves enervated by
the intense, multisided, and contradictory mother-daughter rela-
tionship that simultaneously drew them together and drove them
apart. Both of them, while highly individualistic and creative in their
own ways, were very much products of their times, so any analysis
of Wilder and Lane as authors must be, in part at least, a discussion
of the depression decade and the powerful cultural and political
forces that coursed through it.
The Stock Market Crash of 1929, while not directly causing the
economic debacle of the thirties, set in motion a series of events that
collectively brought into being the worst economic calamity in
American history. Not only was capitalism in crisis, but also Ameri-
can democracy appeared to be in danger. Wilder’s Little House
books and much of Lane’s writing during the 1930s were, to one de-
gree or another, responses to the challenges that people all around
the United States were experiencing. Ironically, the man in the White
House, Franklin D. Roosevelt, elicited Wilder and Lane’s scorn and
ire, although he, more than anyone else, was responsible for saving
capitalism at a time when extremists of the right and left, not to men-
tion totalitarians, were taking over in other parts of the world. In
Lane’s case, the hatred the president inspired in her was close to
pathological.
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