Rose Wilder Lane - Literary Collaboration

Literary Collaboration

Lane's exact role in her mother's famous Little House on the Prairie series of books (the basis for the television show, Little House On the Prairie) 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, first-person narrative manuscript outlining her hardscrabble pioneer childhood, titled Pioneer Girl. 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. Despite Lane's efforts to market Pioneer Girl through her publishing connections, the manuscript was resoundingly rejected, although one editor recommended crafting a novel for children out of the beginning. Wilder and Lane worked on this project, thus producing "Little House in the Big Woods", which was accepted by Harper & Row in late 1931. The success of the book resulted in the decision to continue the series, following young Laura Ingalls into young adulthood.

It remains unclear whether Laura Ingalls Wilder was a naturally skilled novelist who never discovered her talents until her sixties, with Lane's only contribution to her mother's success her encouragement and her established connections in the publishing world, or if Lane essentially took her mother's unpublishable raw manuscripts in hand and completely (and silently) ghostwrote 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 a 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 written 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.

Whatever the extent of Lane's help to her mother in writing the books, it certainly played some role. 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.

Lane's editing 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 19th century, 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.