Rose Wilder Lane

Author. She was an American author of the early 20th century, who was known for her short stories, novels, and political essays. She was the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was the world-renowned author of the "Little House on the Prairie," a series of children's books, published between 1932 and 1943. Later, her mother's books were adapted into a television series, running from 1974 to 1983. Living in the hardship of poverty, her family dealt with a deadly epidemic, a house fire, droughts and crop failures, and even a baby brother who died as an infant. In 1894, the family moved to Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri. Rose often lived with her grandparents and aunts and uncles. Attending several schools in various states, she graduated at the top of her seven-student class in 1904. Unfortunately, she was unable to attend college as a result of her parents' poverty, hence she was motivated to self-educate herself by reading. Between 1905 and 1909, she was employed by Western Union in Missouri, Indiana, and California. On March 24, 1909, in California, she married Claire Gillette Lane, a newspaper writer and promotional salesman. With her husband's career, the couple began to travel throughout the United States. According to public records, the couple had a stillborn son later that year, and complications from a surgery that followed left her unable to have children. Returning to California, she began a career in selling real estate until World War I started. In 1915, she began a thirty-year journey of free-lance writing of hundreds of stories and columns for the "San Francisco Bulletin" along with various magazines including "Sunset," "The Ladies Home Journal," "Harper's Monthly," "Asia," "Country Gentleman," and "The Saturday Evening Post." In 1917, she published her first book, "Henry Ford's Own Story." After several years of separation, she and her husband were divorced in 1918. She never remarried, but he did. She wrote "Diverging Roads" in 1919, a fictional novel about their marriage failure. This followed with her relocating to Greenwich Village, New York. She became a ghost writer for Frederick O'Brien's "White Shadows on the South Seas," but, in 1920, wrote "The Making of Herbert Hoover" under her own name. After World War I, she became a reporter for the American Red Cross, traveling about the world and reporting on worn-torn countries. After traveling to Albania, she wrote "The Peaks of Shala" in 1923. While being her translator and guide, a 12-year-old Albanian boy in a Red Cross orphanage, Rexh Meta, saved her life. She adopted him and eventually, he attended the University of Cambridge, earning his Doctorate in 1937 in the field of Economics and becoming the Albanian Director of Economics. In 1924, she returned to the United States, settling in Missouri on her parents' Rocky Ridge Farm, where she wrote 25 short stories and the novels "Cindy" and "Hill Billy." After returning to Albania, she wrote "Travels with Zenobia" before leaving the political unstable country for the United States in 1928. "Travels with Zenobia" was not published until 1983. After World War II and the Communist takeover of Albania, Meta was sentenced to death for being a respected intellectual and a patriot. Rose worked with United States President Truman to commute his death sentence to life in prison; he served 27 years, died in 1985, and was buried in Shkodra. After not being successful in procuring her mother's books for publication, she helped, at the suggestion of a publisher, to edit the books to children's books, thus her mother's books were published as the "Little House" series. Critics soon notice similarities in the writing style between mother and daughter. While at the family's farm, she wrote "Let the Hurricane Roar" in 1933; "Free Land" in 1938, which became a best-seller; and "Old Home Town," which was about a pre-World War I town and looking at marriage and women's rights. By 1938, she was back in New York and then Connecticut, where she became heavily involved in politics and wrote "The Discovery of Freedom." She and two other female authors were the founders of the United States political movement called libertarianism, promoting individual liberty. She was against Communism, Socialism, and any other form of government that denied the freedom of the individual. She is given credit for being a part of the start of the Libertarian Political Party. In 1943, she met Roger Lea MacBride, a teenage son of one of her editors. A deep relationship developed as he held with her political reasoning; he began to call her "grandmother." Later, after he became a lawyer, she hired him to manage her affairs and he eventually became her heir. MacBride wrote a series of sequels to the "Little House" books, called "The Rose Years." Representing the Libertarian Party in 1976, MacBride was an unsuccessful United States Presidential candidate. In 1945, she began writing for the National Economic Council's "Review of Books." She was highly against Social Security. In 1957, her mother died, and later Rose made Rocky Ridge Farm a museum as a memorial to her mother. In 1965, as a 78-year-old war correspondent, she traveled to South Vietnam for "Woman's Day." After a three-year birthday tour of Europe was planned, she died in her sleep.