Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder

by John E. Miller

  Some people who crossed her path were worse than dull; in Rose's estimate, they were essentially subliterate and incapable of functioning like normal human beings. Quoting from a letter that a loan applicant had written to her mother, she noted the ignorance of the writer; schooling could do nothing for someone like this. “How long will it take us to recognize the necessary existence of classes?” Rose wondered. “There's such a cruelty, in forcing ambition upon this poor creature, who, without ambition, as a servant born and bred, accepting the inevitability of being a servant, would be a busy, contented, and doubtless most excellent servant all her days.”56

  Rose often experienced violent mood swings. In early October 1929 she was suffering from a severe case of the blues. Tired and bewildered, she wished she could discover “something—anything, even the very least little thing—graspable in living.” All she could see was an “endless stream of time pouring through the fingers and leaving nothing, nothing at all.” A month later, after the stock market crash, with everything in her life seemingly going to hell, she observed that she was feeling almost gay. She refused to sympathize with people who wanted to end it all; she said she could not believe that suicidal people really did not want to live. “Our whole resentment of the terms on which we live comes from such an ardent love of life that we can't bear it to be less valuable, beautiful, perfect than our love impels us to imagine it,” she wrote Fremont Older. In an attempt to analyze her own mood swings, Rose guessed that she was the manic-depressive type.57

  The stock market debacle at the end of the year and the onset of the Great Depression left a deep impression on both Rose and Laura. The money they had invested in the Palmer Company evaporated. Money worries, which for a short time had receded, now began to obsess Rose. She quickly abandoned any intention of moving back East, feeling herself tied more than ever to Rocky Ridge, both because of her obligation to support her parents and because it was cheaper to live there. It was at just this time that Laura began writing a memoir of her childhood and adolescence. Later, after the memoir's transformation into a series of children's novels, her writing would start bringing in the kind of steady income that would finally allow Rose to make good her escape. Laura's pioneer stories, like the two that Rose would write about her parents’ and grandparents’ adventures on the late-nineteenth-century frontier, were partly shaped by their thinking about the depression and the experience that the country was going through at the time.

  The year 1930 began badly for both households at Rocky Ridge. Laura's teeth were bothering her, leaving her so sick that Rose finally took her to St. Louis to have some dental work done. Bills piled up. Rose found it harder and harder to sell articles to the magazines, and the book market seemed to have disappeared entirely. She felt like she was working harder than ever—sometimes ten hours a day—but managed to place only one short story during the first half of the year. Compounding their problems was a heat wave that withered crops and left the thermometer hovering around one hundred degrees every day.58

  Rose grew more and more despondent as troubles accumulated. “This life is really nauseating,” she wrote in her diary in January. But in the middle of everything Laura finished writing her autobiographical account about her childhood, beginning with her earliest childhood memories and ending with her marriage to Almanzo. In writing her Missouri Ruralist columns, she had sometimes included brief vignettes based on childhood memories. Rose had been encouraging her to expand upon them with stories for possible publication. What Laura had written this time was a straightforward first-person account of her recollections of growing up on the frontier. A few of the episodes included in the narrative had been used earlier in the Ruralist. She apparently wrote the memoir during the first part of 1930. On May 7 she delivered her handwritten copy to Rose, who took about ten days to type the manuscript and make her own emendations. The final result was approximately two hundred pages long. Rose mailed it to her agent in New York, Carl Brandt, on May 17, hoping that he might be able to find a magazine that would publish it as a serial. Meanwhile, she extracted some of the early material her mother had written about her childhood in Wisconsin and fashioned it into a separate twenty-page story titled “When Grandma Was a Little Girl.” She and her mother apparently thought that this might work as the basis for a picture book for young children.59

  In writing her story in pencil on cheap, lined tablets, Laura inserted marginal notes, directed at Rose, indicating why she was doing things a certain way, asking questions, or pointing up potential difficulties. These were all intended to assist Rose in the process of typing and revising the manuscript. No doubt mother and daughter also talked to each other face-to-face from time to time about how to rectify various difficulties in the text or clarify things that readers might question. It was only a short walk over the ridge from one house to the other, and they must have made the trek frequently. Her motive in writing her life story, Laura told her daughter, was not money, but prestige.60

  Carl Brandt attempted to interest a number of magazines in Laura's autobiography. Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, Atlantic Monthly, and Country Home all turned down the idea of serializing the story. Yet, there was some encouraging feedback, too. While Rose was visiting in New York City in October, Graeme Lorimer of the Saturday Evening Post characterized “Pioneer Girl” as “a grand piece of work, fascinating material and ‘most intelligent writing’” and informed her that the Post would undoubtedly have taken it had they not previously purchased some other submissions along the same line. Moreover, Lorimer indicated, the magazine likely would still buy it if it could be reworked into fictional form. “But I know you don't want to work it over into fiction,” Rose commented when she passed the information along to her mother. “I haven't any doubt at all that it will go in book, but what I want to do is to exhaust serial possibilities before offering it for book publication.”61

  While she was staying in New York, Rose switched literary agents, dropping Carl Brandt for George T. Bye, whose list of clients included such stellar personages as Lowell Thomas, Franklin P. Adams, Heywood Broun, Will Durant, Damon Runyon, and Rebecca West. In correspondence with her new agent, Rose sounded almost apologetic in suggesting that he might want to get involved in trying to place some of her mother's material, explaining that she realized that probably not much—if any—money would be in it for him. Bye, for his part, was not very impressed when he saw Laura's manuscript. “Pioneer Girl didn't warm me enough the first reading,” he wrote Rose. He did not think it dramatic enough to draw in many readers. Rather, it appeared to be the work of a “fine old lady” who was “sitting in a rocking chair and telling a story chronologically but with no benefit of perspective or theatre.” Ironically, had the Saturday Evening Post or some other publisher been willing to take the autobiography at this time, Laura probably would have become a one-shot nonfiction wonder, and Laura Ingalls Wilder—the beloved children's author—probably never would have been discovered.62

  Laura's transformation from memoirist to novelist began when Berta Hader, a literary friend of Rose's to whom Rose had sent a copy of “When Grandma Was a Little Girl,” interested Marion Fiery of Alfred A. Knopf's juvenile department in it. Fiery quickly wrote to Laura, indicating her interest. “I like the material you have used: it covers a period in American history about which very little has been written, and almost nothing for boys and girls.” Instead of a picture book for very young children, however, she thought Laura's stories would be more interesting for beginning readers between eight and twelve years old. She suggested that the manuscript be expanded from its original six or seven thousand words to about twenty-five thousand and that more details about the everyday life of pioneers be added, including information about food, clothing, games, bullet molding, and so forth. She also thought that the use of the terms Ma and Pa for Laura's parents sounded a little too colloquial and that a stronger title was needed.63

  Meanwhile, Rose visited with Fiery, who told her basically the s
ame thing. Rose wrote home to say that the children's book editor “is crazy about your writing; indeed, everyone is who has seen it. She says you make such perfect pictures of everything, and that the characters are all absolutely real.” Laura would be able to start working on the revisions before Rose returned to Rocky Ridge, so Rose told her where to look in her files for the manuscript of “When Grandma Was a Little Girl.” Explaining what it was all about, Rose told her mother, “It is your father's stories, taken out of the long Pioneer Girl manuscript, and strung together, as you will see.”64

  Rose suggested that Laura buy another tablet and write another fifteen thousand words or so. If it seemed easier for her to write in the first person, she should go ahead and do it that way. After she returned home, Rose could go through the manuscript again and change everything into the third person. They could modify the lead and expand the time span covered to an entire year rather than just a single winter. “Of course I have said nothing about having run the manuscript through my own typewriter,” she reassured Laura, “because the changes I made, as you will see, are so slight that they could not even properly be called editing. It is really your own work, practically word for word.”65

  It took Laura two months to come up with the additional pages requested by Knopf. Meanwhile, Rose had passed on to Fiery Laura's larger autobiographical manuscript, but the editor apparently was no more interested in it than the other editors who had already seen it. On further reflection, she said that she had changed her mind about the names, concluding that using “Ma” and “Pa” would work just fine, because they reflected the atmosphere of the time. On May 8, according to Rose's diary, Laura came to Rose's place for tea, bringing her manuscript with her. Rose was busy at the time working on a story called “Vengeance,” which she had begun three days earlier, so she set her mother's manuscript aside for the time being. It took two weeks for Rose to finish writing, editing, and retyping the story, the name of which in the meantime had been changed to “A Spool of Thread.” She mailed it to her agent on May 20.66

  The following day, a Thursday, Laura went to Rose's house at breakfast, and they roughed out fifteen thousand words of the Knopf juvenile. After finishing her own work, Rose immediately started getting her mother's book into shape for submission to the publisher. She finished fifty-six hundred words on Friday, leaving time to gather some wildflowers and ferns with her friend Corinne Murray. On Saturday she recorded in her diary that she had almost finished her work on the manuscript. Laura walked over in the afternoon and read it, and she and Almanzo stayed to eat dinner with Rose. On Sunday, Rose completed her editing and copied the first chapter. The next two days were long ones of typing; Rose finished copying the manuscript by half past four on Tuesday afternoon, when Laura came to read the final chapter. On Wednesday, she prepared the manuscript for mailing, having completed the entire task of blocking out the story, editing, and retyping it in a week's time. Considering the short amount of time that she spent on the task, whatever changes Rose made in her mother's manuscript had to have been done quickly and relatively lightly. Significantly, this, the first of eight books that mother and daughter would collaborate on, received the lightest editing.67

  Rose composed a note to Marion Fiery to send with the manuscript expressing her hope that Fiery would like the finished result since the stories included in it meant so much to her mother. Concealing her own role in helping produce the manuscript, Rose commented disingenuously, “I don't know just where or how I come into this, do you? But somehow I do, because my mother naturally consults me about everything concerning her writing.” She suggested that contractual details be worked out with the Bye agency. Unfortunately, Fiery had gone on a trip to Europe by the time the revised manuscript arrived at her office, and she did not get a chance to look at it until mid-August. Meanwhile, Laura and Almanzo finally felt able to leave on an automobile trip to De Smet in order to attend the annual Old Settlers’ Day celebration there on June 10. Within a month's time, the gears were turning at Knopf, and they decided to publish Laura's book under the title Little House in the Woods, after considering and rejecting other possibilities, such as “Trundle-Bed Tales,” “Little Pioneer Girl,” “Long Ago Yesterday,” and “Little Girl in the Big Woods.” Marion Fiery wrote to say that she had found the manuscript “delightful” and that she was “quite keen” on it.68

  Rose asked George Bye to handle the contract negotiations, indicating that for him it would merely be a matter of collecting the royalties and remitting them directly to her mother, minus his agency's customary 10 percent commission. She sent her mother's address (Mrs. A. J. Wilder, Mansfield, Missouri) so that he could communicate directly with her. Laura was not widely known yet as “Laura Ingalls Wilder,” but in short order she would be. She already was planning two more children's books and had started one of them, Rose indicated to Bye. “It's really awfully decent of you to bother with this small fry; I do appreciate it,” she told him. “And I don't expect you really to bother. I want it to be nothing more than a bit of semiannual office routine which will adequately pay for itself.” Whether Rose had any notion at the time that a “juvenile” book could earn substantial prestige and wealth for an author or whether she was deliberately trying to obscure her own role in the book's production is hard to say, but doubtless she considered her efforts in this instance to have been merely formal and perfunctory. After spending two weeks on a fifteen-page story for magazine publication, she had devoted exactly one week to working on her mother's book.69

  Then word arrived from Marion Fiery that the Knopf firm had decided to close its children's department. It was a simple cost-cutting exercise, prompted by the effects of the depression. Fiery said that she was heartbroken and suggested that they reject the contract with Knopf, which under the circumstances would be able to do little to promote the book, and rather try to place it with Harper and Brothers or Macmillan. It was probably because of Fiery that the manuscript came into the hands of Virginia Kirkus at the Harper and Brothers children's department. Kirkus's off-the-cuff response to the idea of a fictionalized true story about a pioneer girlhood was less than enthusiastic at first; she had seen and been unimpressed with too many similar stories already. However, a quick reading of the manuscript engendered a completely different response in her. “But the real magic was in the telling,” she later recalled. “One felt that one was listening, not reading.” She would later consider her “discovery” of Laura Ingalls Wilder to be one of the milestones of her book-publishing career. News that Harper's would take Laura's manuscript arrived at Rocky Ridge by telegram from Marion Fiery on Thanksgiving Day. The displaced children's book editor requested that Laura send her an autographed copy of the book after it was published. “I do feel such a personal interest in it and I'd love to own it,” she wrote.70

  Laura's new editor, Virginia Kirkus, wrote expressing her great pleasure that Harper and Brothers now was being given the opportunity to publish her book. “May I take for granted your permission to make certain editorial changes in the transitions between the main story and the anecdotes told within the story?” she inquired. “There may be some other minor changes, but these seemed to me the most striking. I assure you that the pattern of the whole will not be touched.” Harper's enthusiastically promoted the book in hopes of boosting lagging sales. “Big” was added as a modifier to “Woods” to balance “Little House” in the title. Now the book would be called Little House in the Big Woods. Helen Sewell, a well-known illustrator, was contracted to do the illustrations for the volume, which now was in the form of a narrative storybook rather than the picture book that had originally been envisioned.71

  After so many months of delay and worry, the process moved ahead swiftly now. On December 18, Virginia Kirkus relayed the good news that the Junior Literary Guild had chosen the book as an April selection. Page proofs arrived at Rocky Ridge on January 20, 1932, and Laura sat down to tea with Rose before going about correcting them. By the end of March, Laura had
received her author's copies, and she went to Rose's for tea to let her inspect them. “Very well done,” Rose jotted in her diary. Official publication occurred on April 6. Laura could have been only extremely happy to see her work in book form and the glowing reviews that quickly accompanied it. After telling Rose that her motive in writing was not money, but prestige, she now began to reap it.72

  7

  Becoming a Celebrated Author

  1932–1937

  The publication of Laura's first book in 1932 at the age of sixty-five transformed her life. Henceforth she would be known primarily not as “Laura Wilder” or “Bessie Wilder” or “Mrs. A. J. Wilder.” To her thousands—and eventually millions—of admiring fans, she would be “Laura Ingalls Wilder.” Her identity now rotated less around her roles as farm wife, club member, or small-town citizen and more around her status as a widely acclaimed and increasingly popular author of children's novels. During the next eleven years, as seven more books were published, young people wrote to her begging for more stories of her childhood on the frontier, and librarians and schoolteachers installed her in their literary pantheon.