DEDICATION
To all of those who first read these letters and preserved them,
and to all who will enjoy reading them within this book.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction: “Certainly You May Call Me Laura”
A Note on Editing
A Laura Ingalls Wilder Chronology
PART I CHAPTER 1: The Farmer’s Wife (1894–1920)
CHAPTER 2: The Emerging Writer (1921–1930)
CHAPTER 3: A New Enterprise (1931–1936)
PART II CHAPTER 4: Star of the Children’s Department (1937–1943)
CHAPTER 5: The Last Golden Years (1944–1949)
CHAPTER 6: The Author of Classics (1950–1956)
Afterword
Index
Photo Section
About the Authors
Also by William Anderson
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Creating this book was a process of many years. Dozens of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s letters were shared with me from diverse sources. Eventually, I organized the correspondence by year and filed it away. Finally, I decided that this collection is too significant to languish in a file cabinet.
I am grateful to the Little House Heritage Trust, to Abigail MacBride, its trustee, and to Noel Silverman, its counsel, for the opportunity to weave together this last major unpublished Wilder collection. Appreciation is also due to Roger MacBride, who, years ago, encouraged this book but said, “Wait awhile.” His suggestion was a wise one, because scores of additional Laura Ingalls Wilder letters were unearthed in the ensuing years.
The staff at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum has always been helpful and informative in making the Wilder and Lane papers available to me and hundreds of other researchers. Archivist Matthew Schaefer has been especially valuable during the making of this book, particularly during a last-minute research glitch. Jeff Corrigan of the State Historical Society of Missouri provided letters and historic photos, as did the Burton Historical Collection, located at the Detroit Public Library. My editors at HarperCollins, Kate Morgan Jackson and Tara Weikum, led me to letters to and from the great Ursula Nordstrom, and directed me to the George Bye Collection at Columbia University. The amazing Garth Williams was always a font of anecdotes dealing with the illustrating of the Little House books.
For over fifty years, the venerable Aubrey Sherwood of De Smet, South Dakota, did more than anyone to foster Laura Ingalls Wilder’s legacy. He was always magnanimous in sharing his store of anecdotes and copies of his Wilder correspondence with me. Both Aubrey and his fellow South Dakotan Alvilda Myre Sorenson were tireless in making their state aware of the Little House books. Their treasured Wilder letters appear in this book.
My long and friendly association with the home sites of Laura Ingalls Wilder has helped lend context to my editing and annotation of these letters. These locales include museums and preserved home sites in Pepin, Wisconsin; Independence, Kansas; Burr Oak, Iowa; Spring Valley, Minnesota; Malone, New York; Walnut Grove, Minnesota; De Smet, South Dakota; Keystone, South Dakota; and Mansfield, Missouri. My great appreciation extends to all the volunteers and staff who enable these places to thrive.
It is a satisfying feeling to include letters that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote to members of the now-gone generation who were the first to memorialize her. These people include Harold and Della Gordon, Neta Seal, Aubrey and Laura Sherwood, Everett Lantz, Charles Lantz, Vera McCaskell, Dorothy Smith, Alvilda Sorenson, Hazel Gilbert Failing, and Clara Webber. I am blessed that this original fellowship of Wilder enthusiasts welcomed me into their circle when I started research on the subject. Clara Webber commented on the bond that “Wilder people” forge: “I always instantly like any admirer of the Little House books!”
Those who shared letters, information, and advice during this book project are many. These include Barbara M. Walker, Dr. John Miller, Yumiko Taniguchi, Jean Coday, Cheryl Harness, and Connie Neumann.
I am indebted to the initial editor of this book, Maya Ziv. She is an author’s dream, extending generous laissez-faire tactics as I worked through the writing and compiling process. When I worried about length, she simply said, “The book can be what it will be.” Later on, Sofia Ergas Groopman added her own sparkling savvy to the editing process. David Michael, general factotum, always responded to remedy my skimpy computer skills.
My sincere appreciation to everyone who was involved in the making of this book. In an era when letter writing is a diminished art, we have an opportunity to share this historical and literary treasure trove in The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder. This book is both a reminder of a bygone era of genuine communication and another visit with Laura Ingalls Wilder, pioneer and author.
—WILLIAM ANDERSON
INTRODUCTION
“Certainly You May Call Me Laura”
The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder is the final collection of unpublished writings from the author of the Little House books. There no longer remains a well of her words left to print.
Since Laura Ingalls Wilder’s death in 1957, readers have welcomed the publication of her remaining writings: On the Way Home, The First Four Years, West from Home, and A Little House Sampler, each published by HarperCollins. In 2015, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography was released by South Dakota Historical Society Press. Pioneer Girl was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s apprentice book-length manuscript. It is a memoir of her frontier youth, culminating with her 1885 marriage to Almanzo Wilder in De Smet, South Dakota. The book became a runaway bestseller. By happenstance, this volume of letters was assembled while Pioneer Girl was being prepared for publication.
Although Laura Ingalls Wilder’s readers know her younger self well from her Little House books, the adult Laura is more elusive. Her later written introspections are scarce, save for columns she wrote for the Missouri Ruralist during her middle-age years. She kept no regular diaries, except for brief trip journals. The letters included in this book are a window into her philosophy and her experiences as a farmer’s wife, a mother, a journalist, and an author of classic books. In these letters, we hear the public and private voice of the woman behind the literary legend. For this reason, these letters deserve to be read. Most of them were written from her final home, Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri.
This book contains some of the four hundred–plus letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder that are held in public and private collections. The letters published here span Laura’s life from 1894, when she was twenty-seven, through 1956, when she was eighty-nine. This is only a fraction of her lifetime correspondence. Sad to say, many of her letters are lost to history.
Laura penned literally thousands of responses to her readers during the last twenty-plus years of her life as an author. “I cannot bear to disappoint a child,” she told her editor, Ursula Nordstrom, when discussing her steady deliveries of fan mail. Her replies were always heartfelt. Examples of them are included in the following pages, though not all that have been unearthed. Many of her fan mail responses are similar in content. The sampling herein is typical, and shows Laura’s sincere regard for her reading public.
The correspondence of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her writer daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was first collected by Roger Lea MacBride. Roger was Rose’s longtime attorney. “He adopted me as a spare grandmother when he was 14,” she explained. When Rose died in 1968, Roger inherited a formidable task: honoring the wishes of his close friend, and tending the legacy of the Little House books.
Roger
discovered boxes and files of Rose’s papers in her Danbury, Connecticut, home. Her colorful correspondents ranged from the actress Sarah Bernhardt to U.S. president Herbert Hoover. Most significant among the papers was the correspondence from Laura Ingalls Wilder, some fifty years’ worth. Laura’s letters to Rose confirm the close collaboration between the two in the writing of the Little House books. Indeed, Rose was her mother’s writing coach and mentor as early as 1910, and their teamwork endured through the publication of the eighth Little House book in 1943. Particularly enlightening are Laura’s and Rose’s letters written between 1936 and 1939, while writing On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, and The Long Winter. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship. Rose’s vast experience as a successful journalist, novelist, and short-story writer provided the expertise that enhanced Laura’s native talent as a storyteller. In turn, Laura’s pioneer memories contributed grist for Rose’s top-paid magazine fiction and bestselling books like Let the Hurricane Roar and Free Land.
To bring together the scattered correspondence of mother and daughter, Roger MacBride canvassed people and places possessing their written words. He ultimately assembled a panoramic collection. Of these, Laura’s letters to her husband, Almanzo Wilder, whom she called Manly, written during a 1915 trip to visit Rose in San Francisco, surfaced in their Rocky Ridge farmhouse. They were simply too good not to publish. The result was West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, San Francisco, 1915 (Harper & Row, 1974). Laura’s letters home reveal her wit, descriptive powers, and lively interest in the world. Her trip to see the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair, also known as the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, had another purpose as well. “I intend to try to do some writing that will count,” Laura confided to her husband. Rose found time from her own writing deadlines for the San Francisco Bulletin to tutor Laura in journalism.
Transcribing Laura’s handwritten letters was a herculean task, performed admirably by Roger MacBride’s secretary. I consulted these transcripts when I researched and wrote several books, including Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography (Harper Collins, 1992). Ultimately, the immense cache of Wilder-Lane materials was deposited at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. Dwight Miller was a key figure in organizing and archiving these thousands of papers. Over the years the archive has been studied by innumerable scholars; many significant books and articles have resulted.
The reader of this book will observe considerable gaps in the scope of Laura’s letters. As Barbara Walker, the author of The Little House Cookbook (Harper & Row, 1979), has noted: “The final Little House after-story is essentially a sad one; of four daughters there remain no progeny.” With no interested descendants around, great segments of the family’s written records vanished.
We have none of Laura’s introspections on such family sorrows as Rose’s unsuccessful marriage and her 1918 divorce from Gillette Lane. We know little of Laura’s role in the nurture of her aging mother and her blind sister, Mary, in their final years. Nor can we share Laura’s grief at the deaths of her parents and her three sisters. Never does she write about her loss of an infant son and grandson, or of Manly’s debilitated vigor after suffering polio during their early marriage. There are no remaining words to shed light on these life experiences.
Laura summarized the dispersal of her family’s heirlooms and keepsakes when writing to Aubrey Sherwood, the editor of the De Smet News, in 1952. “Things from our old home,” she explained, “were scattered as were Carrie’s later and I do not know what happened to them.”
For the scholar, the greatest loss is the decades of letters that Laura sent to her family in De Smet after leaving there in 1894. Such correspondence would be a gold mine of information to add to the skimpy facts known of the earliest years of Laura, Manly, and Rose in Missouri. Laura’s parents and sisters were savers; such letters were tucked away in their house on Third Street in De Smet.
In 1946 the Ingalls home was emptied of its remainders. Vera McCaskell, a De Smet native, remembered the leftovers as a hoard of musty quilts, clothing, trunks, dishes, and antiquated remnants of housekeeping. Post-Depression prairie people were eager to dispose of such reminders of hard times. Who cared for stacks of Mary Ingalls’s raised print and Braille books and papers? Or piles of letters tied together with string?
Vera witnessed a flurry of paper descend from a second-floor window onto a truck bed bound for the town dump. A friend of Laura’s sister Carrie was responsible for the housecleaning. Later she regretted her role. She called on Aubrey Sherwood at his newspaper office, mourning that “I’ve done something terrible, letting those things go. We should have saved those things.” Written history of De Smet’s first residents was tossed out. A few seemingly worthless items were saved by neighbors: a book, a shawl, a container of cloves, and a single volume of Mary’s embossed-print Bible.
Laura’s sister Carrie Ingalls Swanzey died in Rapid City, South Dakota, just weeks before the family home in De Smet was emptied. Her own home in Keystone, a few miles from Mount Rushmore, was chockablock with family keepsakes and letters. In the nick of time, before Carrie’s attorney ordered her house cleared, a friend intervened. She gathered up a random sampling of historic gems: old photographs, clothing, jewelry, knickknacks, and letters. These treasures are now exhibited by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society in De Smet and the Keystone Area Historical Society.
In 1957 Rose Wilder Lane presided over her mother’s final days in the farmhouse at Rocky Ridge Farm. Laura died on February 10, three days after her ninetieth birthday. The long strain left Rose devastated and exhausted. She was seventy, the last link to the pioneering Ingalls family. She wandered through the chilly farmhouse on Rocky Ridge, confronting a lifetime of possessions. She found thousands of letters from Little House readers and boxes of foreign postcards she had sent to her parents during her worldwide travels. There were reams of typed letters she had sent home from diverse places. There were folders of personal and editorial correspondence, and piles of yellowing paper. Rose was overwhelmed by the tangible evidence of her mother’s rich, multifaceted life.
Rose’s initial response was to burn the papers she readily found. She destroyed numerous letters she had written to her parents. Little of the correspondence that Rose sent home after 1939 now survives, though her letters had continued unabated. Rose tossed handfuls of paper into the fireplace flames, and the smoke curled into the winter sky. Luckily, Rose overlooked six of the original Little House manuscripts. These were penciled proof that the books were extensively revised before their publication. “I thought I had personally disposed of all papers in the house,” Rose said in retrospect. Fortunately, for history, her purge was spotty. “I was out of my mind at the time,” she admitted, “all shaky inside, my mind quivery, too.”
But then Rose’s burden and bewilderment—deciding what to do with her parents’ possessions—was alleviated. Mansfield citizens formed an ad hoc committee determined to preserve the Wilder home as a memorial. Rose agreed to the fledgling plan. When she closed the door at Rocky Ridge for the final time, she left the contents of the house essentially undisturbed from then on.
At her home in Danbury, Rose destroyed many of her mother’s letters to her, particularly those written during the 1940s and 1950s. Between 1936 and 1949, when Rose was completely absent from Rocky Ridge Farm, her mother’s affectionate letters still flowed regularly. The gap in documentation from 1940 until 1956 is regrettable.
Following Rose’s death, Roger MacBride explored the cartons of letters stored in her cedar-lined attic. As he read the correspondence, he understood that Rose had left proof of her role in creating the Little House books. She always adamantly denied such involvement. But there is no doubt that the books were, as one scholar dubbed them, “rose-colored classics.”
Laura and Rose’s mother-daughter collaboration was enormously fruitful. The Little House books became staples in libraries, schools, bookstores, and homes around
the world. Reader response to the books was overwhelming. Fan mail filled the Wilders’ rural route mailbox with each delivery. Some days brought Laura twenty-five letters, others fifty or more pieces of mail. “I never came to visit but what Mrs. Wilder was answering her fan mail,” a friend remembered. Her dining table was usually spread with letters, stationery, and postage stamps.
Laura devised a method to respond to admirers. She jotted notes on envelopes, citing particular questions the letter writer asked. These she incorporated into gracious responses, telling the fates of her family members, gently promoting her eight books, and returning her love and best wishes.
For fans, Laura’s replies were exciting events when received. The letters, always in neat longhand, were displayed in classrooms and libraries, reported by the local press, and saved as family treasures. Those who received them often felt compelled to write again.
A librarian from Topeka wrote: “I wish you might have been there to see the boys and girls who were delighted with your sweet note.”
A mother from New York described her children’s awe: “I wish you could have seen the excitement your letter created here. . . . Richard, our little boy, met the postmaster and came tearing in the house shouting, ‘Mother, Mother! Look what we’ve got.’ Ruth’s eyes nearly popped out of her head.”
A classroom in Kansas wrote back: “We were happy to get your nice letter. It made us feel like we really know you.”
A correspondent from Tarrytown, New York, replied during the era of World War II rationing: “It was more than kind of you to take the time to answer my letter. The children could hardly believe I had heard from the real Laura. . . . I want so strongly to do something for you. I am enclosing a sugar stamp. Perhaps your sugar allotment is not sufficient to permit you to make Mr. Wilder gingerbread or pie or cake as often as you would like to.”
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