Retirement
For much of the 1920s and 1930s, between long stints living abroad (including Albania), Lane lived with the Wilders at Rocky Ridge Farm. As her free-lance writing career flourished, she successfully invested in the booming stock market.
Her newfound financial freedom led her to assume increasing responsibility for her aging parents' support, as well as providing for the college educations of several young people she "adopted," both in Albania and Mansfield. Lane also took over the farmhouse her parents had built and constructed a modern stone cottage for them as a gift. However, when Lane left the farm some years later, the Wilders moved back to their own home, and finished their lives there. By the late 1920s, they had scaled back the farming operation considerably and Wilder had resigned from her positions with the Missouri Ruralist and the Farm Loan Association. Hired help was installed in the caretaker's house Lane had built on the property, to take care of the remaining farm work that Almanzo, now in his 70s, could no longer easily manage.
A comfortable and worry-free retirement seemed possible for the Wilders until the Stock Market Crash of 1929 wiped out the family's investments. The couple still owned the 200 acres (0.8 km2) farm, but they had invested most of their savings with Lane's broker. Lane was faced with the prospect of selling enough of her writing in a depressed market to maintain the financial responsibilities she had assumed, and the Wilders became dependent on her as their primary source of support.
In 1930, Wilder asked her daughter's opinion about a biographical manuscript she had written about her pioneering childhood. The Great Depression, coupled with the death of her mother Caroline in 1924 and her sister, Mary, in 1928, seem to have prompted her to preserve her memories in a "life story" called Pioneer Girl. She also hoped that her writing would generate some additional income. The first idea for the title of the first of the books was When Grandma was a Little Girl (later Little House in the Big Woods). After its success, Laura continued writing; Laura's sister, Carrie, shared her own memories.
Read more about this topic: Laura Ingalls Wilder
Famous quotes containing the word retirement:
“He who comes into Assemblies only to gratifie his Curiosity, and not to make a Figure, enjoys the Pleasures of Retirement in a[n] ...exquisite Degree.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“Convent. A place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
“Adultery itself in its principle is many times nothing but a curious inquisition after, and envy of another man’s enclosed pleasures: and there have been many who refused fairer objects that they might ravish an enclosed woman from her retirement and single possessor.”
—Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667)