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 noted (with Ayn Rand and
Isabel Paterson) as one of the founding mothers of the American libertarian movement and is also considered one of the seminal forces behind the American
Libertarian Party[citation needed].
Early life and schooling
Rose Wilder Lane was the first (and only surviving) child of Laura Elizabeth
Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder. Lane's early years were difficult ones for her
parents, the result of successive crop failures, illnesses and chronic economic hardships. During her childhood, Lane moved with
her family several times, living with relatives in Minnesota and then Florida, briefly returning to De Smet, South Dakota before the
family finally settled in Mansfield, Missouri in 1894, where her parents eventually
established a dairy and fruit farm. Lane 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 in Crowley. Despite this academic success, her parents' financial situation placed
college out of reach and her formal schooling was over.
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 her high school 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, where the station master was the father of a school friend.
Before she turned eighteen, 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, Lane bore a son who was either
stillborn or died shortly after birth. Complications from subsequent surgery appear to have left Lane unable to bear more
children. The details of the child's death remain vague; the topic is mentioned only briefly in a handful of existing letters,
written years later to express sympathy and understanding to close friends who were also dealing with the loss of a child.
For the next few years, Lane and her husband led a somewhat vagabond existence, traveling around the US and working together
various marketing and promotional schemes. Preserved letters written to her parents describe a rather happy-go-lucky existence
with both Lane and her husband transversing the US several times and working a variety of jobs, both together and separately.
However, in diary entries and subsequent published autobiographical pieces concerning this period of life, Lane described herself
as depressed and disillusioned with her marriage, caught in the tension arising from the recognition that her intelligence and
interests did not mesh with the life she was living with her husband. One account even had her attempting suicide by drugging
herself with chloroform, only to awake with a headache and a renewed sense of purpose in life. Keenly aware of her lack of a
formal education, during this time Lane read voraciously and taught herself several languages. Her writing career began around
1910, with occasional free-lance newspaper jobs that earned much needed extra cash. From about 1912 - 1914, Lane--one of the
earliest female real estate agents in California--and her husband sold farm land in what is now the San Jose/Silicon Valley area of northern California. It made sense for the two to work separately to earn separate commissions, and
Lane turned out to be the better salesman of the two. The marriage foundered, there were several periods of separation, and
eventually an amicable divorce. Lane's diaries reveal subsequent romantic involvements with several men in the years after her
divorce, but she never remarried. Over the years Lane informally "adopted" and educated several young men throughout her life,
considering them all to be her "sons".
The threat of America's entry into World War I had seriously weakened the real estate
market, so in early 1915 Lane accepted a friend's offer of a stopgap job 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 romantic fiction
serials that would run for weeks at a time, and captivated readers with striking human interest articles and biographical
sketches of the rich and famous. Her accounts of the lives of Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Jack London, and Herbert Hoover (who became a lifelong friend) were published in book form. Also in 1915, Lane's mother
Laura Ingalls Wilder visited for several months. Together they attended the
Pan-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE); many details of this visit and Lane's daily life in 1915 are preserved in Wilder's
letters to her husband and are available in West From Home, published by Lane's heir in 1974.
Although Lane's diaries indicate she was separated from her husband in 1915, Wilder's letters do not indicate this. Gillette Lane
was recorded as living with his wife, although unemployed and looking for work during his mother-in-law's two month visit. It
seems the separation was either covered up for her mother's visit, or had not yet involved separate households.
Launches free-lance writing career
By 1918, Lane's marriage was officially ended and she had quit her job with the San Francisco Bulletin to launch a
career as a free-lance writer. From this period through the early 1940s, Lane's work regularly appeared in leading publications
such as Harper's, Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies' Home Journal. Several of her
short stories were nominated for O. Henry Prizes and a few novels became top sellers. In the late 1920s, she was reputed to be
one of the highest-paid female writers in America, and counted among her friends figures such as Herbert Hoover, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson and Lowell Thomas. Despite this success, Lane's
compulsive generosity with her family and friends often found her strapped for cash and forced to work on material that paid
well, but did not engage her growing interests in political theory and world history. She suffered from periodic bouts of
self-doubt and depression in mid-life, self-diagnosing herself as manic-depressive
(now more commonly known as bipolar disorder). During these times of depression, when
she was unable to move ahead with her own writing, Lane would easily find work as a ghostwriter or "silent" editor for other
well-known writers, who were well-aware of her talents in that area.
Lane's occasional 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." She traveled extensively in Europe and Asia as part of the Red Cross. In 1926 Lane, Helen Dore Boylston and their French maid traveled from France to Albania in a car they had named
"Zenobia". An account of the journey, Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford was published in 1983. Lane
became enamored with Albania, and lived there for several long periods during the 1920s, spaced
between sojourns to Paris and her parents' Rocky Ridge 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. In 1928, Lane returned to the U.S. to live on her parents' farm and
there she took in and educated two local orphaned brothers. In 1938, Lane purchased a rural home outside of Danbury, Connecticut, where she spent the remainder of her life.
Literary collaboration
Lane's exact role in her mother's famous Little House series of books has remained unclear. A contributing factor was
the stock market crash of 1929, which wiped out both Lane's and her parents'
investments. The ensuing Great Depression further reduced the
market for her writing, and she found herself isolated and depressed at Rocky Ridge Farm, struggling to maintain her commitments
to support herself, her adopted children and her elderly parents, who had retired from active farming with Lane's encouragement
and financial support. Her ghostwriting jobs increased at this time, because her depression tended to affect her ability to
generate ideas for her own writing projects. In late 1930, her mother approached her with a rough manuscript outlining her
hardscrabble pioneer childhood. Lane, using her well-developed sense of what was marketable, took notice. She recognized that an
American public weary of the Depression would respond warmly 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 as she
matured from ages five to eighteen.
Was Wilder a naturally skilled novelist who somehow never discovered her own talents until her sixties? Was Lane's only
contribution to her mother's success her encouragement and her established connections in the publishing world? Or, did Lane have
to essentially take her mother's unpublishable raw manuscripts in hand and completely (and silently) ghostwrite the series of
books we know today? The truth appears to lie 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 editing and
ghostwriting skills are well-documented. The existing evidence (including ongoing correspondence between the women concerning the
development of the multi-volume series, Lane's extensive personal diaries detailing the time she spent working on the
manuscripts, and Wilder's own initial draft manuscripts) tends to reveal an ongoing mutual collaboration that involved Lane more
extensively in the earlier books, and to a much lesser extent by the time the series ended, as Wilder's confidence in her own
writing ability increased, and Lane was no longer living at Rocky Ridge Farm. Lane insisted to the end that she considered her
role to be little more than that of an adviser to her mother, despite much documentation to the contrary. Wilder did not keep
copies of her correspondence with Lane, but Lane kept carbon copies of virtually everything she ever wrote—including the
correspondence with her mother concerning the Little House Books. The correspondence shows that Wilder sometimes adamantly
refused to accept some of her daughter's suggestions, and at other times gratefully accepted them. In the end, this partnership
resulted in a sometimes tense yet remarkable collaboration between two talented women.
It can be said that perhaps Wilder's greatest strength was her skill as a compelling storyteller, fueled by a keen insight
into human behavior and a rich memory of childhood tales and vivid family recollections. Lane's razor-sharp editing and
ghostwriting skills brought the dramatic pacing, literary structure, and characterization needed to make the stories publishable
in book form. In fact, this collaboration benefited Lane's career as much as her mother's—many of Lane's most popular short
stories and her two most commercially successful novels were written at this time and were fueled by material which was taken
directly from her mother's recollections of Ingalls-Wilder family folklore—Let the Hurricane Roar (later retitled Young
Pioneers) and Free Land, both addressed the difficulties of homesteading in the Dakotas in the late 1800s, and how the
"free land" in fact cost many homesteaders their life savings. The Saturday
Evening Post paid Lane large fees to serialize both novels, and both were also adapted for highly popular radio
performances.
Clearly, the collaboration boosted both writers' careers by giving the other what each lacked on their own, and it also
enabled them to recoup their financial losses from the Depression.
Later years
After about 1940, despite continuing requests from editors for both fiction and non-fiction material, Lane turned away from
commercial writing and became known as one of the more influential American libertarians
of the middle 20th century. She vehemently opposed the New Deal, creeping socialism, Social Security, wartime rationing and all forms of taxation, claiming she ceased writing highly
paid commercial fiction in order to protest the paying income taxes. She cut her income and
expenses to the bare minimum, and lived a modern-day version of her ancestors' pioneer life on her rural land near
Danbury, Connecticut. A staunch opponent of communism after experiencing it first hand in the Soviet Union during
her Red Cross travels, she wrote the seminal 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 as a fundamentalist libertarian, 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 - a charge often also leveled against her fellow intransigent
female libertarians, Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson.
After her mother's death in 1957, Lane generously donated the Rocky Ridge Farmhouse and many of her family's belongings there
to help establish the popular museum that still draws thousands of visitors each year to Mansfield. Inheriting Wilder's growing
"Little House" royalties put an end to Lane's self-enforced modest lifestyle, she began to travel extensively again, and
thoroughly renovated and remodeled her Connecticut home. Also during the 1960s, Lane revived her own commercial writing career by
publishing several popular magazine series, including one about her remarkable tour of the Vietnam
war zone in late 1965. She also wrote an immensely popular book detailing the history of American needlework (with a
strong libertarian undercurrent) for Woman's Day and edited and published "On The Way Home", providing an autobiographical
setting around her mother's original 1894 diary of their six week journey from South Dakota to Missouri. This book was intended
to serve as the capstone to the Little House series, for those many
fans who since Wilder's death were now writing to Lane asking, "what happened next?". She also contributed book reviews to the
influential William Volker Fund, and continued to work on extensive revisions to The Discovery of
Freedom, which she never completed.
Lane was the adoptive "grandmother" and mentor to Roger MacBride. MacBride is best
known as the Libertarian Party's 1976 candidate for President of the
United States. MacBride was the son of one of her editors with whom she formed a close bond when he was a young boy, later
admitting she was grooming him to be a future Libertarian thought leader. Later, in addition to being her close friend, he also
became her attorney, business manager and ultimately the heir to the "Little House" series and the multi-million dollar franchise
that he built around it after Lane's death. MacBride was the author of the spinoff "The Rose Years" Little House Series, a
multi-part semi-fictional re-telling of Rose's life from the age of seven to nineteen.
The last of the many protégés to be taken under Lane's wing was the sister of her Vietnamese interpreter; impressed by the
young girl's intelligence, she helped to bring her to the United States and sponsored her enrollment 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.
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) now better known as Young Pioneers.
- Old Home Town (1935) (fiction)
- Give Me Liberty AKA Credo (1936) (political history)
- Free Land (1938) (fiction)
- The Discovery of Freedom
(1943) (political history) adapted in 1947 as The Mainspring of Human
Progress
- "What Is This: The Gestapo?" (1943) (pamphlet)
- "On the Way Home" (1962)
- The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework (1963}
- Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford (1983) (with Helen Dore Boylston, ed. William Holtz ISBN
978-0826203908
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.
- Lauters, Amy Mattson, 2007. "The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist." University of Missouri
Press. [1].
- Miller, John E., 1998. Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder. University of Missouri Press. Contains extensive material on
Rose and Laura's literary collaboration, including facsimiles of their correspondence.
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