Rose Wilder Lane - Freelance Writing Career

Freelance 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 freelance writer. From this period through the early 1940s, Lane's work regularly appeared in leading publications such as Harper's, Saturday Evening Post, Sunset, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies' Home Journal. Several of her short stories were nominated for O. Henry Prizes and a few novels became top sellers.

Lane was also the first biographer of Herbert Hoover, writing The Making of Herbert Hoover in 1920 in collaboration with Charles K. Field, editor of Sunset magazine. She was a friend and defender of Hoover for the remainder of her life, and many of her personal papers are now in the Rose Wilder Lane Collection at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa. Lane's papers contain little actual correspondence between Hoover and herself, but the Hoover Post-Presidential Individual series contains a file of Lane correspondence that spans from 1936–1963.

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, Isabel Paterson, 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, 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.

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 named Rexh Meta, who she claimed saved her life on a dangerous mountain trek; she 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.