June 15, 2023 • 43 mins
How do you convey how much you loved the things you loved as a child? For lots of people, that thing is the Little House books. For better or worse, the books have shaped children’s lives and influenced how we understand American history. But to truly understand what we love and why we love it, we have to know where it comes from. The books didn’t just spring fully formed from Laura’s mind. There were many people, places, and institutions responsible for getting them published. This week, host Glynnis MacNicol takes us from Mansfield, Missouri to the halls of New York publishing houses to explain how the Little House books got written in the first place and shaped into the books we continue to return to today.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
How do you convey how much you loved the things
you loved as a child? Is it even possible?
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I really liked Little House on the Prairie because it's
cool to read about things stuff you've never done before.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Read the books when I was a kid, and I
just loved them.
Speaker 4 (00:19):
I found Little Town on the Prairie and I was cooked.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
We know, we never love anything the way we did
when we were seven or eight boys.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Ab an eight year old boy like me who grew
up on a farm in New York. Yeah, they used
to live in this little mill sort of thingy.
Speaker 5 (00:37):
I like that little house.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
But is there a language to describe how deep this
kind of love goes, how formative it is.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
I went through a phase where I wanted to be
a pioneer.
Speaker 6 (00:48):
You see their relationship blossom and see them go through
happy times and struggle together.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
It's like you're actually there when you're reading the book.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
It's almost like the things we love work their way
into our DNA and then seemed to reappear at key
moments in our lives.
Speaker 7 (01:04):
The pandemic hid and I said, I haven't read those
things in years, And I thought, well, I'm imabit help everything.
I was doing was canceled. I need to do something interesting,
and I thought, well and go back.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
I have time. I'll go read the Little House Books.
Some of you might recognize that voice. That's Alison Arngrim,
the actress who played Laura's iconic nemesis Nellie Olsen on
the hit television show Little House on the Prairie. During Lockdown,
Allison started reading the Little House Books out loud on
Facebook for anyone who wanted to tune in.
Speaker 7 (01:34):
So I got on Facebook and say, okay, guys, the
woman who wrote nine books, and I will read them all,
starting with book one?
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Can you help me up?
Speaker 5 (01:41):
Can you hear me?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Can you hear me?
Speaker 7 (01:43):
Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl
lived in the big I read the Little House Books
every freaking day. I read all nine books. A lot
of people said it really got throm through the pandemic.
I got a big commemorative thing from my local senator
for raising Marie during the pandemic, exploring the works of
lower ingles Wilder, increasing literacy rate, etc.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Et cetera, a thing, a proclamation. But why were all
these people tuning in to be read to? If you
were born during lockdown? There were plenty of options. Was
it the thrill of being read to by Nelly? Was
it the tale of the Ingles, self sufficiency, the coziness
of the family, the sense of safety from the outside world.
Maybe it was all of the above. Allison has a
(02:25):
theory of her own.
Speaker 7 (02:27):
The problems of the Ingles are universal. The majority of
people on Earth don't actually have very much money, and
the Ingles live in like a two proom house with
a whole bunch of kids and worry if they're going.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
To make it through the week.
Speaker 7 (02:44):
That's really how Probably eighty ninety percent of humans on
the planet are living in a tidy place with a
lot of children, wondering if they'll have enough to eat.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
The Little House on the Prairie series has remained popular
since they were first published in the nineteen thirties at
the height of the Great Depression, like seriously popular. They've
sold more than sixty million copies worldwide. Their average rating
on Goodreads is four point two. Hundreds of thousands of
readers have reviewed them. Maybe it's more interesting to consider
(03:15):
the books in the context of what Alson mentioned. It's
not just that they are popular, it's when they are
extra popular The series seems to peak at key moments.
Speaker 8 (03:25):
The close of an era, the Great Big Spree, the Jazz.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
As it first emerged in the Great Depression, It resurged
along with the television show during the post Vietnam economic
hardship of the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 8 (03:37):
We'll want to work, but can't find jobs or product to.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Day's over, And then it made a return during the
global pandemic.
Speaker 6 (03:42):
New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut all ordering non essential
employees to stay home.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Readers seem to turn to Laura's books in greater numbers
when times are hard. This is probably not a coincidence.
The time period Laura was writing about, the eighteen seventies,
was a gate of severe economic hardship in America was
essentially the country's first Great Depression. During her childhood, Laura
survived debilitating hunger, poverty, child labor disease, and extreme environmental events.
(04:17):
And then, after all that, just when she should have
been at least slowing down, she did the opposite. At
age sixty three sixty three, she took pen to paper
and wrote down her story. The result or fundamentally changed
children's books and also how we understand a part of
(04:37):
American history. How did she do this? Who helped? How
is this woman, after so much suffering, able to find
the magical details in all that deprivation, so that, nearly
a century later, in other times of hardship, so many
of us returned to her. I'm Glennis McNicol, and this
(04:59):
is wilder.
Speaker 9 (05:47):
We're going to start with the first one. All right,
read the top.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
What's that saying, Little House in the Big Wood.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
That's our producer Joe reading the first Little House book,
Little House in the Big Wood, to her then four
year old son Charlie for the very first time.
Speaker 9 (06:04):
Right, should we get started? So, as far as the
little girl could see, there was only the one little
house where she lived with her father and mother, her
sister Mary, and baby sister Carrie. The barrels of salted
fish were in the pantry, and yellow cheeses were stacked
on the pantry.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Shelves, and one hung.
Speaker 10 (06:27):
Making me.
Speaker 9 (06:29):
It was making me so hungry.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
So Joe, how did Charlie like the book?
Speaker 9 (06:35):
He loved it. He found it completely magical. He asked,
when we're going to move to a little house in
the Big Woods and survive on bear and deer? And
play with pigs bladders.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Yeah, I think I could hear it in Charlie's voice,
and I think it's sort of the tone of his voice,
and his response captures the challenge of talking about the
actual Little House books. They are magical, and they're so engrossing,
and they're perfectly formed, and like, how do you explain
(07:10):
that to someone who hasn't read them? So I feel like,
if you're a person who hasn't read these books, you're
just going to have to take my word for it,
because I imagine there's something in everyone's life, Like there's
something in your life that you have felt this strongly
about as a kid. So even if you don't understand
(07:32):
the books, you understand the feeling.
Speaker 9 (07:36):
Okay, all right, that's great, But I still think you
have to give our listeners just a little sense of
the basic plot points. Are we on the moon? Are
there aliens involved?
Speaker 11 (07:45):
When?
Speaker 9 (07:46):
And where are we in space? What exactly happens in
this book? Because unlike you, not everybody knows.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
I'm going to do my best. Okay, the Little House
in the Prairie book series is not so we tried
so many times to sum up this book series, and
none of it worked until I made a voice memo
for Joe from my bathtub and we really nailed it.
And here it is.
Speaker 12 (08:17):
The books open Laura four years old, living in the
Big Woods of Wisconsin with her family, and she loves
very much and it's very cozy and there's a lot
of animal slaughtering and food. And then Pa takes the
family to what is then called Indian Territory what is
now Kansas, and they legally squat there and build a house,
(08:40):
and they have a lot of interactions with Native Americans,
and then we're told the government asked them to leave
because they shouldn't be there, and they're very angry about it.
And Pa takes them to Minnesota, Walnut Grove, Minnesota, where
they live in a dugout, and Laura meets her arch nemesis,
Nellie Olsen, and then pap builds them a really beautiful
house based on the bumper crop he's expecting to get
(09:03):
and they move in, and then the bumper crop gets
eaten by a plague of grasshoppers for like.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Four years in a row.
Speaker 12 (09:11):
And then paulmost dies in a snow bank and starves
to death, but he doesn't and then Mary Laura's older
sister goes blind, and pau goes to the Dakota Territories
to work on the railroad, and the family follows and
they help build this town of Disment, South Dakota, and
they survive a historically long and bad winter that's in
(09:33):
the history books.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
The whole town almost starves to death, but they don't.
Speaker 12 (09:37):
And then Laura's our, she Nemesisnelli, arrives again. Laura goes
to school, she meets her future husband, Almonzo. They want
to send Mary off to college for the blind, and
so Laura goes to work as a school teacher at
the age of fifteen in a very remote place and
the family she's living with, the wife is so angry
to be there that she in the middle of the night,
she tries to stab her husband to death. Laura finishes
(09:59):
her job, comes home with the money, comes back to
her family, and then Almonzo continues to court her, and
then she.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
And Almonzo get married.
Speaker 12 (10:08):
And the very last book, which is published after Laura died,
is but the first four.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Years of their marriage. There you go, that's the plot
point overview. Wow, And it sounds crazy when I say it,
but the thing to know is that all of these
books involve these like incredible tactile descriptions of food and clothing.
She's always talking about how prettily Ma has organized the house.
(10:33):
Laura's like the original lifestyle blogger, and everything in their
home is cheerful and snug. But there's also this dark
undercurrent of danger that runs through everything, which I loved
as a kid. But most importantly I think is that
parts of these books are deeply problematic, and particularly the
(10:55):
third book, Little House on the Prairie, when they're illegally
squatting on osage and there are quite a few violent,
racist descriptions of Native Americans. This is what gets the
most attention when people are critical of the books. But
I think it's important to note that there are not
the only problematic issues. There are plenty of examples, like
in the seventh book, Little Town on the Prairie, there's
(11:16):
an entire chapter about a minstrel show that Pop participates
in where he's dressed in blackface. At the same time,
these books are about a complicated girl. She gets angry,
she gets jealous, she has it ventures, and she has
a lot of agency like she also loves her family,
so much, and the books hold all of this.
Speaker 9 (11:36):
So if you had to say, in one line or less,
what the thing that you loved the most about the
books was, what would it be.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
That Laura is a real person and the things she
wrote about happened to her.
Speaker 9 (11:51):
Because there's a lot of stories about girls out there,
But what you're saying is that none of those were
real people, and you related to the fact that she
was a real person who actually lived these adventures.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, that's the key here, right, She's real, but she
also made you feel like you were in it with her,
that you were walking in her shoes.
Speaker 9 (12:13):
But is that story the truth? The actual truth?
Speaker 1 (12:19):
No, They're shelved in the fiction section for a reason.
Speaker 9 (12:23):
So what does it mean that these stories were fictionalized
that they ended up in the fiction section.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I think what it really means is that reading these
books as a kid felt like they sort of emerged
perfectly formed, directly from Laura's head, And the truth was
they didn't, obviously, But you know, even more than that,
these books had a long road to publication. They were
very intentionally crafted by a variety of people. I sort
(12:53):
of think of it like like the children's literature version
of taking a cotton swab the inside of your cheek
and then you know, you send it off to ancestry
dot com to find out who all your ancestors are.
So when I say that I love these books so
wholeheartedly as a child that I feel like you could
(13:14):
take my DNA and put under a microscope and you'd
find like braids there and probably like some wolves, then
I want to understand what else is in this DNA,
or like, who else is here? If these books were
so formative to me and to a lot of people,
then what is forming us? Or perhaps the better question
(13:36):
is who? And that's where we're going to go after
the break. We are literally going to go on the
map to where the books actually begin and find out
who is behind them.
Speaker 6 (13:57):
Day a misery than Simans Do I get off her
city limit Mansfield.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I'm in a place called Mansfield, Missouri with our producer Emily.
Mansfield might not mean anything to you until I tell
you that Mansfield, Missouri is in the Ozarks, an hour
west of Springfield, Missouri. All I knew as a kid
is that it was on a different page of my
parents Atlas and that Laura lived there. It always felt
mysterious all the places.
Speaker 13 (14:23):
Mansfield, Missouri was on the back cover of every single
Laura Ingla's book I owned, so just even driving into
it still I feel like a little kid.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Like driving into a map that I was so obsessed with.
Mansfield isn't in the Little House books, but it is
the site of their creation story. Its main attraction is
Rocky Ridge Farm, a picturesque white farmhouse perched on a hill.
This is where Laura, her husband Almonzo, and their young
daughter Rose settled in eighteen ninety four. Rocky Ridge is
(14:54):
Laura's house. Laura designed every inch of it to her specifications,
right down to the height of the kitchen canters because
she was so tiny. She also designed her own writer's
book looking out on the lawns, and then Almonzo built
it all for her.
Speaker 12 (15:09):
I mean this setup is fantastic.
Speaker 10 (15:11):
Yeah to me.
Speaker 14 (15:13):
I live in this house as a writer. This is amazing, right,
I mean, there's anyone it's amazing. But man, the place
converted the small radio chest under the tall window to
a storage chest when it stopped working. On the opposite
walls or it's desk where many of the Little House
books were written.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
This is the place where the sausage got made, or,
in Laura's case, this is the place where she described
how sausages got made in a way that made children
want to make sausages.
Speaker 14 (15:37):
Her blue shawl was kept handy on the back of
the chair to warm her shoulders. The daybed couch served
as a handy place to sleep in the early morning
hours after she had written through most of the night.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
She's a nighttime writer. The day bed isn't here.
Speaker 11 (15:47):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Rocky Ridge is a place you go to encounter Laura
the writer, not the children's book character, but the woman
who wrote the books. The Rocky Ridge Museum lives many
of the most well known artifacts from Laura's books. The
piece of lace Ida gives her before her wedding, the
glass plate Laura saves from their burning house in the
first four years. It also holds the most important artifact.
(16:12):
It's pause actual fiddle. That's intense. It was such a
it's like a character in the book. It's not like
it is. They don't just have Pau's fiddle. Once a
year they take it out and they play it. Laura's
(16:33):
daughter Rose wrote that before they left South Dakota, Pa
told Laura he was leaving the fiddle to her. He said, Laura,
you've always stood by us. When the time comes, I
want you to have the fiddle.
Speaker 15 (16:47):
It's very intense of him standing in front of a window,
that she wrote the books, but also the way she
the idea that that's what is seen through the windows
now is like this, but not just the legacy of
her books. It's like the legacy of the thing she
loved the most, which was her father, and the music
so extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Laura's entry into writing began when Rose, already a successful
full time journalist, encouraged her mother to try her hand
at it. And the truth was Laura needed to bring
in more money. The farm was barely making ends meet.
Starting in nineteen eleven, when Laura was in her mid forties,
all the way through nineteen twenty four, she had a
farm calm in the Missouri Ruralist under the byline missus A. J. Wilder,
(17:35):
Laura wrote pieces titled Economy and Egg Production and good
Times on the Farm. It's easy to have fun if
you plan for it. Her writing was practical and geared
towards other farm wives like herself, and yet, even then,
amidst all the egg advice, Laura was envisioning more.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
I think she always had a sense of, you know,
wanting to be a writer.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
That's Caroline Fraser, author of Prairie Fires The American Dreams
of Laura Ingles Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize in
twenty eighteen.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
I mean, I think it was very kind of a
vague notion, but I think those feelings were there.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Laura Ingles Wylder was a woman who'd been harboring some
big dreams for a long time. In nineteen fifteen, at
age forty eight, Laura made a cross country trip to
visit her daughter, Rose, traveling all the way to San
Francisco by herself. During the lengthy visit, Rose encouraged her
mother to pitch some stories about her travels as a
way to make money. In one of her letters home
(18:38):
to Almonzo, Laura tells him, I intend to try to
do some writing that will count. Of course, all aspiring
writers want to do writing that will count and pay.
Not all aspiring writers have a daughter who's one of
the most successful freelance writers in the country. America loves
the story of someone pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
(18:58):
But as we all know, behind most access stories is
a case of someone who knew someone who knew someone,
and in Laura's case, that's someone is Rose, and Rose
knew everyone. Perhaps the best description for Rose is that
she was Laura's fixer. But back to Laura and her
desire to do writing that will count. For Laura, what
(19:19):
counted most was her family and her childhood memories of them.
Caroline Fraser thinks it goes all the way back to
when Laura had to leave her family behind and just
met South Dakota.
Speaker 10 (19:30):
While I was writing the timeline, I could see clearly
that when she and Almnta come to the point where
they have to give up in South Dakota, that leapt
out to me as a profound emotional moment in her
life because leaving then is not what it is now,
(19:54):
and so it really represented a wrenching kind of loss
of her former, her life, and of her relationships that
I think is the primary motivation behind her wanting to
write about her life.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Decades passed between Laura leaving her family and writing about them.
Laura first sat down to write about her childhood following
the death of her older sister Mary in nineteen twenty eight.
Laura was sixty one. Mary's death wasn't the first family loss.
Laura's ma, Caroline Ingalls, had died a few years earlier.
Pa had been dead since nineteen oh two, but there
(20:34):
was something about Mary. When Laura was twelve, Mary had
gone blind and Pa had tasked Laura with being Mary's eyes.
Laura spent the rest of her childhood literally describing everything
she saw to her sister. Something about losing Mary, for
whom she had been the eyes for so many years,
a responsibility that turned her into the descriptive genius she
(20:57):
eventually became. Prompted Laura to start writing about her her youth.
She wanted to preserve her father's stories, the ones she
and Mary had grown up with.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
At least in the beginning.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
She was inspired by those stories and wanted to keep
those stories alive because she felt they were extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
That's Pamela smith Hill, author of Laura Ingalls Wilder, A
Writer's Life. This is something a lot of Wilder scholars
agree on. By the time Laura had lost her paw
and her ma and her older sister Mary, she felt
an overwhelming urge to preserve their family history.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
Laura Inglees Wilder said that she felt that her paws
stories were too good to be altogether lost.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
So Mary dies and Laura decides she's going to write
a memoir. At age sixty three, she sits down at
her custom built desk and tries to describe their life
for everyone who couldn't be there to see it. Laura
called the resulting manuscript Pioneer Girl, and this is key.
She was writing it for grown ups.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
The idea was that she would write her autobiography and
that Lane would try to market it to magazines as
a serial Saturday evening post, Good Housekeeping McCalls one of
those major magazines of the time period.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
That's Nancy Tasted Koppel, the director and editor in chief
of the Pioneer Girl Project, a research and publishing initiative
of the South Dakota Historical Society.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
So she was writing for adults, but the subject matter
was her own use, her life from the time she
was two years old to the time she was eighteen
years old.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Pioneer Girl is heavy on description but light on structure.
Laura wrote it in pencil on the popular Big Chief
Indian tablets you could buy at the drug store. There
are no chapters or even breaks it is written in
first person, house readers will recognize many of the scenes
that eventually made it into the series. For instance, the
(23:05):
story of the wolf circling the house in Indian Territory
is included in the opening pages of Pioneer Girl. It
was one of Laura's first memories. So Laura finishes her
life's work so far and gives it to Rose, who
takes it out to her publishing contexts. But here's the thing,
(23:26):
no one wants it. Here's Pamela smith Hill again.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
The Saturday Evening Post had Pioneer Girl and passed on it.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
And that was that. Pioneer Girl languished an obscurity for
eight decades until Nancy Ty's dad Coople and Pamela smith
Hill published the annotated version in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 4 (23:49):
In a letter back to her mother, Rose said that
the Saturday Evening Post saw a lot to admire, and
Pioneer Girl thought it was well done, but they were
more interested in a fictional version of a pioneer story
rather than in a memoir or an autobiography.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
A fictional version, okay, please travel back in time with
me once again, this time to the local branch of
the Kitchener Waterloo Library. Walk with me down the w
l of the fiction section and observe eight year old
me furiously pulling the Little House Books off the shelves
so I could reshelve them in the nonfiction section where
they belonged a field project because the Dewey decimal system.
(24:38):
But that rage was real, and that rage is what
runs through the devotion the books inspire, devotion, obsession, cult following.
You can pick your own fandom level, but the through
line is the knowledge that the Little House Books are
based on real life, and also they are fiction. But
(24:58):
what did it mean to fictionalize them? And who was
responsible for doing it? And once it was done, how
did it fundamentally change children's literature. After the break, We're
going to take you into the halls of the children's
publishing world and discover what I've come to believe is
the single most important decision made about the Little House Books.
(25:25):
So Laura's written her life story, she sent it out
to everyone, and no one wants it. This is not
actually an unusual experience in publishing. It's certainly something I've
experienced and something our producer Joe has experienced, where you're
told they like parts of what you've done, but you
have to turn it into something they can make money
(25:46):
off of, whether that's something you want to write or not.
Speaker 9 (25:49):
It amazes me that any books get published ever. To
be honest, the process of getting a book published is
one of the most Godonzo's circuses that I have ever
gone through in my professional career.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
And that was true in Laura's day as much as
it is now.
Speaker 9 (26:10):
Absolutely I think so. And what I find amazing about
this story is that Laura submitted the manuscript, it got
rejected by everyone, and she still got to redo. She
still got to redo because Rose, her daughter, had this
access in the publishing world, which is a very rare thing.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah, I mean, Rose was at the time one of
the most successful freelance writers in the country. She was
very connected in New York publishing, like super connected, and
she facilitated getting Laura's manuscripts to like two of the
most iconic children's book editors at the time.
Speaker 9 (26:51):
So the story of how the Little House series came
to be feels like there were so many outside forces
that ultimately made this work for her, right.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Because Rose didn't just know everyone. I think the piece
of the puzzle that's important here is like she knew
how it all worked. She knew what to submit and
who to submit it to. She knew how to pitch,
which you and I both know is like the secret
to the sauce. It's knowing how to pitch, how to pitch,
who to pitch to, and what to pitch and when
(27:25):
to pitch yeah, and when to pend Yeah. Rose was
the trifecta.
Speaker 9 (27:30):
So what did Laura have to turn these books into
in order to actually get them sold?
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Well, the truth is Rose took matters into her own hands.
The story of Little House's trip to bookshelves begin sometime
in nineteen thirty. After Pioneer Girl was turned down by everyone, Rose,
Laura's daughter, who was also desperate for money now thanks
to some bad investments, decides to revise Pioneer Girl as
(27:58):
a very young children's story called When Grandma was a
Little Girl. It's unclear whether Laura even knew Rose did this.
We do know that Rose considered children's book publishing beneath
her own byline, and had initially discouraged her mother from
writing for kids.
Speaker 6 (28:16):
Rose, I think saw the book as something that perhaps
she could take to her friends who were children's illustrators,
and perhaps they might be interested in illustrating it as
children's book.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Rose showed her kid's revision, still under Laura's byline, to
a successful couple she knew who illustrated children's books, and
they sent it to the newly established children's department at Kanoff.
Keep in mind, the children's book industry was in its infancy.
The Kanoff editor read this draft and then requested a
longer version, but one that was aimed at a slightly
older audience think ages seven to nine. Laura immediately got
(28:57):
to work. The result, Little House in the Big Woods,
the first book in the series. We have no correspondence
between Rose and Laura during this time, but we do
know that Kanoff eventually got a new manuscript aimed at
older readers, and they loved it. Hollywood ending right, not
so much. Remember this is the early nineteen thirties. Shortly
(29:23):
after Kanoff gets this manuscript, the depression really hits and
her brand new children's department is shut down due to
budget cuts. But all is not lost. Over at Harper's
and Brothers, a woman named Virginia Kirkus, she'd go on
to found the Kirkus Review, heard a rumor that there
was a new children's book manuscript floating around.
Speaker 8 (29:45):
Virginia Kirkus was the children's editor at Harper and Brothers,
and she heard about this manuscript by an elderly lady
about her frontier childhood, and she agreed to look at it.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
That's Bill Anderson. He's written a number of books on Laura.
For Virginia Kirkus, receiving the Little House in the Big
Woods manuscript was love at first read. She was so
enthralled she missed her train stop on the way home that.
Speaker 16 (30:12):
Weekend, and almost instantaneously, over a weekend, she decided that
she was going to publish Little House in the Big Woods.
And she made an interesting observation. She said, this is
a book that no depression can stop.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
In a letter Kirkus later called Little House in the
Big Woods the highlight of her career. One felt that
one was listening, she said, not reading. Unbeknownst to either
Laura arose in that moment they had landed in the
exact right place at the exact right time. Big Woods
is an instantaneous hit. Little House in the Big Woods
(30:56):
receives the first of five Newberry Award honors that Laura
get in her lifetime. Virginia Kirkus immediately asks for more,
and Laura promptly sits down to write what she views
as the companion piece to Little House in the Big Woods,
an account of Almonzo's much less precarious childhood in northern
New York State. This is Farmer Boy, but readers want more,
(31:20):
and Laura gives it to them. Next comes Little House
on the Prairie in nineteen thirty five, and then over
the following eight years, five more books letters pour in.
Children are obsessed. So Laura, now nearing eighty, is an
internationally renowned author. She has fans writing to her from
(31:45):
all over the world. Her books, by any metric, are
a huge success. And yet I'm not actually convinced we'd
still be talking about the books the way we do
if it wasn't for one key decision. When I tell
you what that is, it's going to seem so obvious.
Was actually shocking to me when I first considered the impact.
(32:06):
Here's Billy Anderson again.
Speaker 11 (32:08):
By the time they were complete to nineteen forty three,
the brilliant editor Ursula Nordstrom at Harpurn Brothers already could
foresee that she had shepherded most of the Little House
Books through publication, and Harper and Brothers had a classic
set of books on their hands.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Even if you don't know Ursula Nordstrom, you know her,
and not just because her family is behind Nordstrom's Department stores.
She's a legend in children's publishing. In addition to Laura,
she published Ebe White's Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, among
many others. Nordstrom started out as Virginia Kirkus's assistant around
(32:49):
the time Laura turned in her fourth book, On the
Banks of Plum Creek, and she also fell in love
with Laura at first read.
Speaker 8 (32:56):
The tone of voice that Ursula Nordstrom always used in
regard to Laura Ingalls Wilder was almost deification. She just
simply adored working with the Wilder books. And she made
the statement that the model for a juvenile novel should
(33:16):
be the book on the Banks of Plumb Creek. She's
set to fledgling authors. Read the Wilder books and you'll
see what children's literature should be.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
In nineteen forty seven, four years after the last book
had been published, Ursula decided to re issue the entire
series as a box set. The original books have been
illustrated by a woman named Helen Sewell. Sewell's illustrations look
a bit like woodcuts, straight lines, sharp edges, a little
cold compared to Wilder's warm family stories and Laura's adventurous spirit.
(33:51):
Norstrom wanted a new look for the new set and
hired a man named Garth Williams to illustrate all eight books.
At the time, Williams was best known for his work
on E. B. White's Stuart Little.
Speaker 11 (34:01):
Garth told me himself, the first editions were decorated, I
illustrated them.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Bill Anderson knew Garth Williams and over the year spoke
with him many times about his work on the Little
House Books. As he tells it, despite William's success with
Stuart Little and eventually Charlotte's Webb, when Nordstrom asked him
to illustrate Laura's books, he wasn't sure he was up
to the task.
Speaker 11 (34:26):
His response was, I haven't been much west of the
Hudson River. I don't know what the west looks like.
So she sent him to find out. She sent him
out to visit Rose Wilder Lane first, who was living
in Danbury, Connecticut, and Garth told me that Rose said,
you must go and visit my parents.
Speaker 8 (34:46):
They're alive and well.
Speaker 11 (34:48):
And very active, and they can tell you everything that
you want to know, and guide you to all the
sites of their former homes and show you our family photographs.
That's how he happened to drive up to the Wilder
farm Rocky Ridge, near Mansfield, Missouri, and spent part of.
Speaker 8 (35:08):
The day with the Wilders.
Speaker 11 (35:11):
And he told me later on, I stood there just
transfixed that there I was with the real Laura and
al Mansell, and he was very favorably impressed with him.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
It was after this meeting Williams set out to replicate
Laura's journey. He drove across the prairie into the woods,
got caught in Midwest snowstorms. He walked down to Smet's
main street. It was actually Williams who found the location
of the dugout near Plum Creek. He saw everything himself.
He walked in Laura's shoes, and this is probably the
(35:44):
reason his illustrations feel so true to what you're reading.
Speaker 8 (35:48):
If Harper had just continued the old school illustrations, I
just think that they would have faded away. But Darth's
work really propelled them. Wilder's royalties hugely improved after the
Dark Williams books came out. She was a comparatively wealthy
(36:10):
little old lady in her later years, and the last
few years were greatly enhanced by the Dark Williams illustrated editions.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Today these illustrations are treated like works of art, as
they should be. In twenty eleven, they actually went to auction.
When we went to Dismeth this summer, the lor Ingleswilder
Memorial Society showed us their entire collection. They had an
entire binder full the original right, I know exactly the
(36:43):
part of the book that's from too.
Speaker 17 (36:44):
This is when they were in little House on the
Prairie when they had been in Kansas. Ma had just
set the Little China Shepherdess up on the mantle, because
wherever they went didn't feel like home until the Little
China Shepherdess was at home owners shiel Pa had built that.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Diana and Cheryl, two of the society's senior staff members,
were kind enough to take Emily and me behind the
scenes into the society's vault, where we went through all
of Garth Williams's illustrations one by one.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Probably we have the most extensive illustrations.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
These illustrations didn't come at a small price, which is
perhaps not a surprise when you consider how devoted Laura
Ingle's following is.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
We had to come up with donation money to get that.
Speaker 9 (37:26):
They were selling them and through an auction, and what
were they averaging in price?
Speaker 17 (37:31):
Well, the first one, the very first, very first one
from Little House on the Prairie of them in the
covered wagon went for twenty two thousand dollars, and Diana like, oh,
we don't get to get any. And then by the
end of that auction they were going down and down
and down. We got one and they only bord only
told us we could buy one, and I bought two.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
It's intense to put a number on the devotion. Laura
Ingles Wilder inspires, it's difficult to quantify our impact, but
her impact was enormous, and one of the reasons for
that is these were not like the books children were
used to reading.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
There's substance to the Little House books, and there's this
kind of wonderful loss that all children's.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Book writers bring to their work.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
But there's also a sense of subversion underneath the text,
and sometimes you don't get that subverted message until you're
an adult.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
That substance is what has carried the Little House Books
through nearly a century of reading. Laura is ingrained in
how we understand children's literature.
Speaker 4 (38:42):
There are so many things that she pioneered. She was
a pioneer in children's literature and writing historical fiction with
a very kind of hard realistic edge to it. She
pioneered writing for young adults, gave us one of our
most memorable disabled characters. She wrote a character in Laurence
(39:05):
Wilder who is unconventional and timeless.
Speaker 9 (39:12):
Now that you know all of the hands that shaped
the Little House Books, all of the forces that turn
them into what they are, how has that changed how
you view the series and how you view Laura.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Yeah, you know, I think we talked about earlier. Is
it's that as a child, I thought these books just
emerged perfectly formed from Laura's head. And so even though
I've written a book and I understand the process required
to do so, it's still in understanding all the people
that were involved in creating the Little House series. It
(39:46):
feels a little bit like discovering you have a family
that you never knew about, secret family, a secret family
you didn't know about. And at the same time it
makes me respect her more in a way because you're like,
this required an enormous amount of work and determination and
(40:07):
like collaboration that I don't think was always easy.
Speaker 9 (40:12):
It really did take a village to craft these classics,
I think. I think the process of getting from where
she started to where the books ended up is kind
of beautiful.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
I also think Laura was very complicated, and the fact
that her difficult, complicated nature as represented on the page
is what stands out. And we now know, you know
how many people were involved in creating that story and
the Laura on the page, then, you know, speaking about
(40:48):
a secret family you didn't know about and complicated women.
When we talk about how these books got made, it's
impossible to do so without talking about out.
Speaker 9 (41:01):
Rose Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's only daughter. I think there's
the argument to be made that in this cast of
people who created the books, she was the most influential
and the most complicated. Rose Wilder Lane. She hung out
(41:25):
with the Lost Generation in Paris. She was a foreign
correspondent in Albania. She wrote biographies of Herbert Hoover, Charlie
Chaplin and Jack London, and was sued by all of
their widows for misinformation. Some people think she founded the
Libertarian Party. It's impossible to talk about Laura without talking
about Rose, and it's impossible to talk about the Little
(41:47):
House books without acknowledging Rose's input. And that's what we're
going to do next week. If you think you knew
everything there was to know about Little House, hang on
to your bonnets. Rose Wilder is written and hosted by
Me Glennis McNichol. Our story editors are Joe Piazza and
(42:10):
Emily Maronoff. Our senior producer is Emily Maroanoff. Our producers
are Mary Dow and Sheena Ozaki. Our associate producer is
Lauren Phillip. Production help from Jessica Crinchich, Sound design and
mixing by Amanda Rose Smith. Our scene in additional music
was composed by Elise McCoy. We are executive produced by
Joe Piazza, Nikki tor, Ali Perry and me. Special thanks
(42:34):
to the lor Ingles Wilder Historic Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri.
Thanks to Charlie Aster and all the other kids actual
and Young at Heart who told us why they loved
the lor Ingles books so much. Thank you to CDM Studios.
Please see our show notes if you want to know
more about the people we interviewed, the places we visited,
the books we mentioned. You can also find our contact
(42:56):
and fel there. If you want to write to us
with your own thoughts and questions. Follow us on Instagram
at Wilder Underscore podcast and on TikTok at Wilder Podcast,
where you can see behind the scenes footage from all
our travels. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.
How do you convey how much you loved the things
you loved as a child? Is it even possible?
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I really liked Little House on the Prairie because it's
cool to read about things stuff you've never done before.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Read the books when I was a kid, and I
just loved them.
Speaker 4 (00:19):
I found Little Town on the Prairie and I was cooked.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
We know, we never love anything the way we did
when we were seven or eight boys.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Ab an eight year old boy like me who grew
up on a farm in New York. Yeah, they used
to live in this little mill sort of thingy.
Speaker 5 (00:37):
I like that little house.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
But is there a language to describe how deep this
kind of love goes, how formative it is.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
I went through a phase where I wanted to be
a pioneer.
Speaker 6 (00:48):
You see their relationship blossom and see them go through
happy times and struggle together.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
It's like you're actually there when you're reading the book.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
It's almost like the things we love work their way
into our DNA and then seemed to reappear at key
moments in our lives.
Speaker 7 (01:04):
The pandemic hid and I said, I haven't read those
things in years, And I thought, well, I'm imabit help everything.
I was doing was canceled. I need to do something interesting,
and I thought, well and go back.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
I have time. I'll go read the Little House Books.
Some of you might recognize that voice. That's Alison Arngrim,
the actress who played Laura's iconic nemesis Nellie Olsen on
the hit television show Little House on the Prairie. During Lockdown,
Allison started reading the Little House Books out loud on
Facebook for anyone who wanted to tune in.
Speaker 7 (01:34):
So I got on Facebook and say, okay, guys, the
woman who wrote nine books, and I will read them all,
starting with book one?
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Can you help me up?
Speaker 5 (01:41):
Can you hear me?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Can you hear me?
Speaker 7 (01:43):
Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl
lived in the big I read the Little House Books
every freaking day. I read all nine books. A lot
of people said it really got throm through the pandemic.
I got a big commemorative thing from my local senator
for raising Marie during the pandemic, exploring the works of
lower ingles Wilder, increasing literacy rate, etc.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Et cetera, a thing, a proclamation. But why were all
these people tuning in to be read to? If you
were born during lockdown? There were plenty of options. Was
it the thrill of being read to by Nelly? Was
it the tale of the Ingles, self sufficiency, the coziness
of the family, the sense of safety from the outside world.
Maybe it was all of the above. Allison has a
(02:25):
theory of her own.
Speaker 7 (02:27):
The problems of the Ingles are universal. The majority of
people on Earth don't actually have very much money, and
the Ingles live in like a two proom house with
a whole bunch of kids and worry if they're going.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
To make it through the week.
Speaker 7 (02:44):
That's really how Probably eighty ninety percent of humans on
the planet are living in a tidy place with a
lot of children, wondering if they'll have enough to eat.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
The Little House on the Prairie series has remained popular
since they were first published in the nineteen thirties at
the height of the Great Depression, like seriously popular. They've
sold more than sixty million copies worldwide. Their average rating
on Goodreads is four point two. Hundreds of thousands of
readers have reviewed them. Maybe it's more interesting to consider
(03:15):
the books in the context of what Alson mentioned. It's
not just that they are popular, it's when they are
extra popular The series seems to peak at key moments.
Speaker 8 (03:25):
The close of an era, the Great Big Spree, the Jazz.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
As it first emerged in the Great Depression, It resurged
along with the television show during the post Vietnam economic
hardship of the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 8 (03:37):
We'll want to work, but can't find jobs or product to.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Day's over, And then it made a return during the
global pandemic.
Speaker 6 (03:42):
New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut all ordering non essential
employees to stay home.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Readers seem to turn to Laura's books in greater numbers
when times are hard. This is probably not a coincidence.
The time period Laura was writing about, the eighteen seventies,
was a gate of severe economic hardship in America was
essentially the country's first Great Depression. During her childhood, Laura
survived debilitating hunger, poverty, child labor disease, and extreme environmental events.
(04:17):
And then, after all that, just when she should have
been at least slowing down, she did the opposite. At
age sixty three sixty three, she took pen to paper
and wrote down her story. The result or fundamentally changed
children's books and also how we understand a part of
(04:37):
American history. How did she do this? Who helped? How
is this woman, after so much suffering, able to find
the magical details in all that deprivation, so that, nearly
a century later, in other times of hardship, so many
of us returned to her. I'm Glennis McNicol, and this
(04:59):
is wilder.
Speaker 9 (05:47):
We're going to start with the first one. All right,
read the top.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
What's that saying, Little House in the Big Wood.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
That's our producer Joe reading the first Little House book,
Little House in the Big Wood, to her then four
year old son Charlie for the very first time.
Speaker 9 (06:04):
Right, should we get started? So, as far as the
little girl could see, there was only the one little
house where she lived with her father and mother, her
sister Mary, and baby sister Carrie. The barrels of salted
fish were in the pantry, and yellow cheeses were stacked
on the pantry.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Shelves, and one hung.
Speaker 10 (06:27):
Making me.
Speaker 9 (06:29):
It was making me so hungry.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
So Joe, how did Charlie like the book?
Speaker 9 (06:35):
He loved it. He found it completely magical. He asked,
when we're going to move to a little house in
the Big Woods and survive on bear and deer? And
play with pigs bladders.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Yeah, I think I could hear it in Charlie's voice,
and I think it's sort of the tone of his voice,
and his response captures the challenge of talking about the
actual Little House books. They are magical, and they're so engrossing,
and they're perfectly formed, and like, how do you explain
(07:10):
that to someone who hasn't read them? So I feel like,
if you're a person who hasn't read these books, you're
just going to have to take my word for it,
because I imagine there's something in everyone's life, Like there's
something in your life that you have felt this strongly
about as a kid. So even if you don't understand
(07:32):
the books, you understand the feeling.
Speaker 9 (07:36):
Okay, all right, that's great, But I still think you
have to give our listeners just a little sense of
the basic plot points. Are we on the moon? Are
there aliens involved?
Speaker 11 (07:45):
When?
Speaker 9 (07:46):
And where are we in space? What exactly happens in
this book? Because unlike you, not everybody knows.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
I'm going to do my best. Okay, the Little House
in the Prairie book series is not so we tried
so many times to sum up this book series, and
none of it worked until I made a voice memo
for Joe from my bathtub and we really nailed it.
And here it is.
Speaker 12 (08:17):
The books open Laura four years old, living in the
Big Woods of Wisconsin with her family, and she loves
very much and it's very cozy and there's a lot
of animal slaughtering and food. And then Pa takes the
family to what is then called Indian Territory what is
now Kansas, and they legally squat there and build a house,
(08:40):
and they have a lot of interactions with Native Americans,
and then we're told the government asked them to leave
because they shouldn't be there, and they're very angry about it.
And Pa takes them to Minnesota, Walnut Grove, Minnesota, where
they live in a dugout, and Laura meets her arch nemesis,
Nellie Olsen, and then pap builds them a really beautiful
house based on the bumper crop he's expecting to get
(09:03):
and they move in, and then the bumper crop gets
eaten by a plague of grasshoppers for like.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Four years in a row.
Speaker 12 (09:11):
And then paulmost dies in a snow bank and starves
to death, but he doesn't and then Mary Laura's older
sister goes blind, and pau goes to the Dakota Territories
to work on the railroad, and the family follows and
they help build this town of Disment, South Dakota, and
they survive a historically long and bad winter that's in
(09:33):
the history books.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
The whole town almost starves to death, but they don't.
Speaker 12 (09:37):
And then Laura's our, she Nemesisnelli, arrives again. Laura goes
to school, she meets her future husband, Almonzo. They want
to send Mary off to college for the blind, and
so Laura goes to work as a school teacher at
the age of fifteen in a very remote place and
the family she's living with, the wife is so angry
to be there that she in the middle of the night,
she tries to stab her husband to death. Laura finishes
(09:59):
her job, comes home with the money, comes back to
her family, and then Almonzo continues to court her, and
then she.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
And Almonzo get married.
Speaker 12 (10:08):
And the very last book, which is published after Laura died,
is but the first four.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Years of their marriage. There you go, that's the plot
point overview. Wow, And it sounds crazy when I say it,
but the thing to know is that all of these
books involve these like incredible tactile descriptions of food and clothing.
She's always talking about how prettily Ma has organized the house.
(10:33):
Laura's like the original lifestyle blogger, and everything in their
home is cheerful and snug. But there's also this dark
undercurrent of danger that runs through everything, which I loved
as a kid. But most importantly I think is that
parts of these books are deeply problematic, and particularly the
(10:55):
third book, Little House on the Prairie, when they're illegally
squatting on osage and there are quite a few violent,
racist descriptions of Native Americans. This is what gets the
most attention when people are critical of the books. But
I think it's important to note that there are not
the only problematic issues. There are plenty of examples, like
in the seventh book, Little Town on the Prairie, there's
(11:16):
an entire chapter about a minstrel show that Pop participates
in where he's dressed in blackface. At the same time,
these books are about a complicated girl. She gets angry,
she gets jealous, she has it ventures, and she has
a lot of agency like she also loves her family,
so much, and the books hold all of this.
Speaker 9 (11:36):
So if you had to say, in one line or less,
what the thing that you loved the most about the
books was, what would it be.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
That Laura is a real person and the things she
wrote about happened to her.
Speaker 9 (11:51):
Because there's a lot of stories about girls out there,
But what you're saying is that none of those were
real people, and you related to the fact that she
was a real person who actually lived these adventures.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, that's the key here, right, She's real, but she
also made you feel like you were in it with her,
that you were walking in her shoes.
Speaker 9 (12:13):
But is that story the truth? The actual truth?
Speaker 1 (12:19):
No, They're shelved in the fiction section for a reason.
Speaker 9 (12:23):
So what does it mean that these stories were fictionalized
that they ended up in the fiction section.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I think what it really means is that reading these
books as a kid felt like they sort of emerged
perfectly formed, directly from Laura's head, And the truth was
they didn't, obviously, But you know, even more than that,
these books had a long road to publication. They were
very intentionally crafted by a variety of people. I sort
(12:53):
of think of it like like the children's literature version
of taking a cotton swab the inside of your cheek
and then you know, you send it off to ancestry
dot com to find out who all your ancestors are.
So when I say that I love these books so
wholeheartedly as a child that I feel like you could
(13:14):
take my DNA and put under a microscope and you'd
find like braids there and probably like some wolves, then
I want to understand what else is in this DNA,
or like, who else is here? If these books were
so formative to me and to a lot of people,
then what is forming us? Or perhaps the better question
(13:36):
is who? And that's where we're going to go after
the break. We are literally going to go on the
map to where the books actually begin and find out
who is behind them.
Speaker 6 (13:57):
Day a misery than Simans Do I get off her
city limit Mansfield.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I'm in a place called Mansfield, Missouri with our producer Emily.
Mansfield might not mean anything to you until I tell
you that Mansfield, Missouri is in the Ozarks, an hour
west of Springfield, Missouri. All I knew as a kid
is that it was on a different page of my
parents Atlas and that Laura lived there. It always felt
mysterious all the places.
Speaker 13 (14:23):
Mansfield, Missouri was on the back cover of every single
Laura Ingla's book I owned, so just even driving into
it still I feel like a little kid.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Like driving into a map that I was so obsessed with.
Mansfield isn't in the Little House books, but it is
the site of their creation story. Its main attraction is
Rocky Ridge Farm, a picturesque white farmhouse perched on a hill.
This is where Laura, her husband Almonzo, and their young
daughter Rose settled in eighteen ninety four. Rocky Ridge is
(14:54):
Laura's house. Laura designed every inch of it to her specifications,
right down to the height of the kitchen canters because
she was so tiny. She also designed her own writer's
book looking out on the lawns, and then Almonzo built
it all for her.
Speaker 12 (15:09):
I mean this setup is fantastic.
Speaker 10 (15:11):
Yeah to me.
Speaker 14 (15:13):
I live in this house as a writer. This is amazing, right,
I mean, there's anyone it's amazing. But man, the place
converted the small radio chest under the tall window to
a storage chest when it stopped working. On the opposite
walls or it's desk where many of the Little House
books were written.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
This is the place where the sausage got made, or,
in Laura's case, this is the place where she described
how sausages got made in a way that made children
want to make sausages.
Speaker 14 (15:37):
Her blue shawl was kept handy on the back of
the chair to warm her shoulders. The daybed couch served
as a handy place to sleep in the early morning
hours after she had written through most of the night.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
She's a nighttime writer. The day bed isn't here.
Speaker 11 (15:47):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Rocky Ridge is a place you go to encounter Laura
the writer, not the children's book character, but the woman
who wrote the books. The Rocky Ridge Museum lives many
of the most well known artifacts from Laura's books. The
piece of lace Ida gives her before her wedding, the
glass plate Laura saves from their burning house in the
first four years. It also holds the most important artifact.
(16:12):
It's pause actual fiddle. That's intense. It was such a
it's like a character in the book. It's not like
it is. They don't just have Pau's fiddle. Once a
year they take it out and they play it. Laura's
(16:33):
daughter Rose wrote that before they left South Dakota, Pa
told Laura he was leaving the fiddle to her. He said, Laura,
you've always stood by us. When the time comes, I
want you to have the fiddle.
Speaker 15 (16:47):
It's very intense of him standing in front of a window,
that she wrote the books, but also the way she
the idea that that's what is seen through the windows
now is like this, but not just the legacy of
her books. It's like the legacy of the thing she
loved the most, which was her father, and the music
so extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Laura's entry into writing began when Rose, already a successful
full time journalist, encouraged her mother to try her hand
at it. And the truth was Laura needed to bring
in more money. The farm was barely making ends meet.
Starting in nineteen eleven, when Laura was in her mid forties,
all the way through nineteen twenty four, she had a
farm calm in the Missouri Ruralist under the byline missus A. J. Wilder,
(17:35):
Laura wrote pieces titled Economy and Egg Production and good
Times on the Farm. It's easy to have fun if
you plan for it. Her writing was practical and geared
towards other farm wives like herself, and yet, even then,
amidst all the egg advice, Laura was envisioning more.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
I think she always had a sense of, you know,
wanting to be a writer.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
That's Caroline Fraser, author of Prairie Fires The American Dreams
of Laura Ingles Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize in
twenty eighteen.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
I mean, I think it was very kind of a
vague notion, but I think those feelings were there.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Laura Ingles Wylder was a woman who'd been harboring some
big dreams for a long time. In nineteen fifteen, at
age forty eight, Laura made a cross country trip to
visit her daughter, Rose, traveling all the way to San
Francisco by herself. During the lengthy visit, Rose encouraged her
mother to pitch some stories about her travels as a
way to make money. In one of her letters home
(18:38):
to Almonzo, Laura tells him, I intend to try to
do some writing that will count. Of course, all aspiring
writers want to do writing that will count and pay.
Not all aspiring writers have a daughter who's one of
the most successful freelance writers in the country. America loves
the story of someone pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
(18:58):
But as we all know, behind most access stories is
a case of someone who knew someone who knew someone,
and in Laura's case, that's someone is Rose, and Rose
knew everyone. Perhaps the best description for Rose is that
she was Laura's fixer. But back to Laura and her
desire to do writing that will count. For Laura, what
(19:19):
counted most was her family and her childhood memories of them.
Caroline Fraser thinks it goes all the way back to
when Laura had to leave her family behind and just
met South Dakota.
Speaker 10 (19:30):
While I was writing the timeline, I could see clearly
that when she and Almnta come to the point where
they have to give up in South Dakota, that leapt
out to me as a profound emotional moment in her
life because leaving then is not what it is now,
(19:54):
and so it really represented a wrenching kind of loss
of her former, her life, and of her relationships that
I think is the primary motivation behind her wanting to
write about her life.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Decades passed between Laura leaving her family and writing about them.
Laura first sat down to write about her childhood following
the death of her older sister Mary in nineteen twenty eight.
Laura was sixty one. Mary's death wasn't the first family loss.
Laura's ma, Caroline Ingalls, had died a few years earlier.
Pa had been dead since nineteen oh two, but there
(20:34):
was something about Mary. When Laura was twelve, Mary had
gone blind and Pa had tasked Laura with being Mary's eyes.
Laura spent the rest of her childhood literally describing everything
she saw to her sister. Something about losing Mary, for
whom she had been the eyes for so many years,
a responsibility that turned her into the descriptive genius she
(20:57):
eventually became. Prompted Laura to start writing about her her youth.
She wanted to preserve her father's stories, the ones she
and Mary had grown up with.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
At least in the beginning.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
She was inspired by those stories and wanted to keep
those stories alive because she felt they were extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
That's Pamela smith Hill, author of Laura Ingalls Wilder, A
Writer's Life. This is something a lot of Wilder scholars
agree on. By the time Laura had lost her paw
and her ma and her older sister Mary, she felt
an overwhelming urge to preserve their family history.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
Laura Inglees Wilder said that she felt that her paws
stories were too good to be altogether lost.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
So Mary dies and Laura decides she's going to write
a memoir. At age sixty three, she sits down at
her custom built desk and tries to describe their life
for everyone who couldn't be there to see it. Laura
called the resulting manuscript Pioneer Girl, and this is key.
She was writing it for grown ups.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
The idea was that she would write her autobiography and
that Lane would try to market it to magazines as
a serial Saturday evening post, Good Housekeeping McCalls one of
those major magazines of the time period.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
That's Nancy Tasted Koppel, the director and editor in chief
of the Pioneer Girl Project, a research and publishing initiative
of the South Dakota Historical Society.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
So she was writing for adults, but the subject matter
was her own use, her life from the time she
was two years old to the time she was eighteen
years old.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Pioneer Girl is heavy on description but light on structure.
Laura wrote it in pencil on the popular Big Chief
Indian tablets you could buy at the drug store. There
are no chapters or even breaks it is written in
first person, house readers will recognize many of the scenes
that eventually made it into the series. For instance, the
(23:05):
story of the wolf circling the house in Indian Territory
is included in the opening pages of Pioneer Girl. It
was one of Laura's first memories. So Laura finishes her
life's work so far and gives it to Rose, who
takes it out to her publishing contexts. But here's the thing,
(23:26):
no one wants it. Here's Pamela smith Hill again.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
The Saturday Evening Post had Pioneer Girl and passed on it.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
And that was that. Pioneer Girl languished an obscurity for
eight decades until Nancy Ty's dad Coople and Pamela smith
Hill published the annotated version in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 4 (23:49):
In a letter back to her mother, Rose said that
the Saturday Evening Post saw a lot to admire, and
Pioneer Girl thought it was well done, but they were
more interested in a fictional version of a pioneer story
rather than in a memoir or an autobiography.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
A fictional version, okay, please travel back in time with
me once again, this time to the local branch of
the Kitchener Waterloo Library. Walk with me down the w
l of the fiction section and observe eight year old
me furiously pulling the Little House Books off the shelves
so I could reshelve them in the nonfiction section where
they belonged a field project because the Dewey decimal system.
(24:38):
But that rage was real, and that rage is what
runs through the devotion the books inspire, devotion, obsession, cult following.
You can pick your own fandom level, but the through
line is the knowledge that the Little House Books are
based on real life, and also they are fiction. But
(24:58):
what did it mean to fictionalize them? And who was
responsible for doing it? And once it was done, how
did it fundamentally change children's literature. After the break, We're
going to take you into the halls of the children's
publishing world and discover what I've come to believe is
the single most important decision made about the Little House Books.
(25:25):
So Laura's written her life story, she sent it out
to everyone, and no one wants it. This is not
actually an unusual experience in publishing. It's certainly something I've
experienced and something our producer Joe has experienced, where you're
told they like parts of what you've done, but you
have to turn it into something they can make money
(25:46):
off of, whether that's something you want to write or not.
Speaker 9 (25:49):
It amazes me that any books get published ever. To
be honest, the process of getting a book published is
one of the most Godonzo's circuses that I have ever
gone through in my professional career.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
And that was true in Laura's day as much as
it is now.
Speaker 9 (26:10):
Absolutely I think so. And what I find amazing about
this story is that Laura submitted the manuscript, it got
rejected by everyone, and she still got to redo. She
still got to redo because Rose, her daughter, had this
access in the publishing world, which is a very rare thing.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah, I mean, Rose was at the time one of
the most successful freelance writers in the country. She was
very connected in New York publishing, like super connected, and
she facilitated getting Laura's manuscripts to like two of the
most iconic children's book editors at the time.
Speaker 9 (26:51):
So the story of how the Little House series came
to be feels like there were so many outside forces
that ultimately made this work for her, right.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Because Rose didn't just know everyone. I think the piece
of the puzzle that's important here is like she knew
how it all worked. She knew what to submit and
who to submit it to. She knew how to pitch,
which you and I both know is like the secret
to the sauce. It's knowing how to pitch, how to pitch,
who to pitch to, and what to pitch and when
(27:25):
to pitch yeah, and when to pend Yeah. Rose was
the trifecta.
Speaker 9 (27:30):
So what did Laura have to turn these books into
in order to actually get them sold?
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Well, the truth is Rose took matters into her own hands.
The story of Little House's trip to bookshelves begin sometime
in nineteen thirty. After Pioneer Girl was turned down by everyone, Rose,
Laura's daughter, who was also desperate for money now thanks
to some bad investments, decides to revise Pioneer Girl as
(27:58):
a very young children's story called When Grandma was a
Little Girl. It's unclear whether Laura even knew Rose did this.
We do know that Rose considered children's book publishing beneath
her own byline, and had initially discouraged her mother from
writing for kids.
Speaker 6 (28:16):
Rose, I think saw the book as something that perhaps
she could take to her friends who were children's illustrators,
and perhaps they might be interested in illustrating it as
children's book.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Rose showed her kid's revision, still under Laura's byline, to
a successful couple she knew who illustrated children's books, and
they sent it to the newly established children's department at Kanoff.
Keep in mind, the children's book industry was in its infancy.
The Kanoff editor read this draft and then requested a
longer version, but one that was aimed at a slightly
older audience think ages seven to nine. Laura immediately got
(28:57):
to work. The result, Little House in the Big Woods,
the first book in the series. We have no correspondence
between Rose and Laura during this time, but we do
know that Kanoff eventually got a new manuscript aimed at
older readers, and they loved it. Hollywood ending right, not
so much. Remember this is the early nineteen thirties. Shortly
(29:23):
after Kanoff gets this manuscript, the depression really hits and
her brand new children's department is shut down due to
budget cuts. But all is not lost. Over at Harper's
and Brothers, a woman named Virginia Kirkus, she'd go on
to found the Kirkus Review, heard a rumor that there
was a new children's book manuscript floating around.
Speaker 8 (29:45):
Virginia Kirkus was the children's editor at Harper and Brothers,
and she heard about this manuscript by an elderly lady
about her frontier childhood, and she agreed to look at it.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
That's Bill Anderson. He's written a number of books on Laura.
For Virginia Kirkus, receiving the Little House in the Big
Woods manuscript was love at first read. She was so
enthralled she missed her train stop on the way home that.
Speaker 16 (30:12):
Weekend, and almost instantaneously, over a weekend, she decided that
she was going to publish Little House in the Big Woods.
And she made an interesting observation. She said, this is
a book that no depression can stop.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
In a letter Kirkus later called Little House in the
Big Woods the highlight of her career. One felt that
one was listening, she said, not reading. Unbeknownst to either
Laura arose in that moment they had landed in the
exact right place at the exact right time. Big Woods
is an instantaneous hit. Little House in the Big Woods
(30:56):
receives the first of five Newberry Award honors that Laura
get in her lifetime. Virginia Kirkus immediately asks for more,
and Laura promptly sits down to write what she views
as the companion piece to Little House in the Big Woods,
an account of Almonzo's much less precarious childhood in northern
New York State. This is Farmer Boy, but readers want more,
(31:20):
and Laura gives it to them. Next comes Little House
on the Prairie in nineteen thirty five, and then over
the following eight years, five more books letters pour in.
Children are obsessed. So Laura, now nearing eighty, is an
internationally renowned author. She has fans writing to her from
(31:45):
all over the world. Her books, by any metric, are
a huge success. And yet I'm not actually convinced we'd
still be talking about the books the way we do
if it wasn't for one key decision. When I tell
you what that is, it's going to seem so obvious.
Was actually shocking to me when I first considered the impact.
(32:06):
Here's Billy Anderson again.
Speaker 11 (32:08):
By the time they were complete to nineteen forty three,
the brilliant editor Ursula Nordstrom at Harpurn Brothers already could
foresee that she had shepherded most of the Little House
Books through publication, and Harper and Brothers had a classic
set of books on their hands.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Even if you don't know Ursula Nordstrom, you know her,
and not just because her family is behind Nordstrom's Department stores.
She's a legend in children's publishing. In addition to Laura,
she published Ebe White's Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, among
many others. Nordstrom started out as Virginia Kirkus's assistant around
(32:49):
the time Laura turned in her fourth book, On the
Banks of Plum Creek, and she also fell in love
with Laura at first read.
Speaker 8 (32:56):
The tone of voice that Ursula Nordstrom always used in
regard to Laura Ingalls Wilder was almost deification. She just
simply adored working with the Wilder books. And she made
the statement that the model for a juvenile novel should
(33:16):
be the book on the Banks of Plumb Creek. She's
set to fledgling authors. Read the Wilder books and you'll
see what children's literature should be.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
In nineteen forty seven, four years after the last book
had been published, Ursula decided to re issue the entire
series as a box set. The original books have been
illustrated by a woman named Helen Sewell. Sewell's illustrations look
a bit like woodcuts, straight lines, sharp edges, a little
cold compared to Wilder's warm family stories and Laura's adventurous spirit.
(33:51):
Norstrom wanted a new look for the new set and
hired a man named Garth Williams to illustrate all eight books.
At the time, Williams was best known for his work
on E. B. White's Stuart Little.
Speaker 11 (34:01):
Garth told me himself, the first editions were decorated, I
illustrated them.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Bill Anderson knew Garth Williams and over the year spoke
with him many times about his work on the Little
House Books. As he tells it, despite William's success with
Stuart Little and eventually Charlotte's Webb, when Nordstrom asked him
to illustrate Laura's books, he wasn't sure he was up
to the task.
Speaker 11 (34:26):
His response was, I haven't been much west of the
Hudson River. I don't know what the west looks like.
So she sent him to find out. She sent him
out to visit Rose Wilder Lane first, who was living
in Danbury, Connecticut, and Garth told me that Rose said,
you must go and visit my parents.
Speaker 8 (34:46):
They're alive and well.
Speaker 11 (34:48):
And very active, and they can tell you everything that
you want to know, and guide you to all the
sites of their former homes and show you our family photographs.
That's how he happened to drive up to the Wilder
farm Rocky Ridge, near Mansfield, Missouri, and spent part of.
Speaker 8 (35:08):
The day with the Wilders.
Speaker 11 (35:11):
And he told me later on, I stood there just
transfixed that there I was with the real Laura and
al Mansell, and he was very favorably impressed with him.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
It was after this meeting Williams set out to replicate
Laura's journey. He drove across the prairie into the woods,
got caught in Midwest snowstorms. He walked down to Smet's
main street. It was actually Williams who found the location
of the dugout near Plum Creek. He saw everything himself.
He walked in Laura's shoes, and this is probably the
(35:44):
reason his illustrations feel so true to what you're reading.
Speaker 8 (35:48):
If Harper had just continued the old school illustrations, I
just think that they would have faded away. But Darth's
work really propelled them. Wilder's royalties hugely improved after the
Dark Williams books came out. She was a comparatively wealthy
(36:10):
little old lady in her later years, and the last
few years were greatly enhanced by the Dark Williams illustrated editions.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Today these illustrations are treated like works of art, as
they should be. In twenty eleven, they actually went to auction.
When we went to Dismeth this summer, the lor Ingleswilder
Memorial Society showed us their entire collection. They had an
entire binder full the original right, I know exactly the
(36:43):
part of the book that's from too.
Speaker 17 (36:44):
This is when they were in little House on the
Prairie when they had been in Kansas. Ma had just
set the Little China Shepherdess up on the mantle, because
wherever they went didn't feel like home until the Little
China Shepherdess was at home owners shiel Pa had built that.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Diana and Cheryl, two of the society's senior staff members,
were kind enough to take Emily and me behind the
scenes into the society's vault, where we went through all
of Garth Williams's illustrations one by one.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Probably we have the most extensive illustrations.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
These illustrations didn't come at a small price, which is
perhaps not a surprise when you consider how devoted Laura
Ingle's following is.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
We had to come up with donation money to get that.
Speaker 9 (37:26):
They were selling them and through an auction, and what
were they averaging in price?
Speaker 17 (37:31):
Well, the first one, the very first, very first one
from Little House on the Prairie of them in the
covered wagon went for twenty two thousand dollars, and Diana like, oh,
we don't get to get any. And then by the
end of that auction they were going down and down
and down. We got one and they only bord only
told us we could buy one, and I bought two.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
It's intense to put a number on the devotion. Laura
Ingles Wilder inspires, it's difficult to quantify our impact, but
her impact was enormous, and one of the reasons for
that is these were not like the books children were
used to reading.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
There's substance to the Little House books, and there's this
kind of wonderful loss that all children's.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Book writers bring to their work.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
But there's also a sense of subversion underneath the text,
and sometimes you don't get that subverted message until you're
an adult.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
That substance is what has carried the Little House Books
through nearly a century of reading. Laura is ingrained in
how we understand children's literature.
Speaker 4 (38:42):
There are so many things that she pioneered. She was
a pioneer in children's literature and writing historical fiction with
a very kind of hard realistic edge to it. She
pioneered writing for young adults, gave us one of our
most memorable disabled characters. She wrote a character in Laurence
(39:05):
Wilder who is unconventional and timeless.
Speaker 9 (39:12):
Now that you know all of the hands that shaped
the Little House Books, all of the forces that turn
them into what they are, how has that changed how
you view the series and how you view Laura.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Yeah, you know, I think we talked about earlier. Is
it's that as a child, I thought these books just
emerged perfectly formed from Laura's head. And so even though
I've written a book and I understand the process required
to do so, it's still in understanding all the people
that were involved in creating the Little House series. It
(39:46):
feels a little bit like discovering you have a family
that you never knew about, secret family, a secret family
you didn't know about. And at the same time it
makes me respect her more in a way because you're like,
this required an enormous amount of work and determination and
(40:07):
like collaboration that I don't think was always easy.
Speaker 9 (40:12):
It really did take a village to craft these classics,
I think. I think the process of getting from where
she started to where the books ended up is kind
of beautiful.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
I also think Laura was very complicated, and the fact
that her difficult, complicated nature as represented on the page
is what stands out. And we now know, you know
how many people were involved in creating that story and
the Laura on the page, then, you know, speaking about
(40:48):
a secret family you didn't know about and complicated women.
When we talk about how these books got made, it's
impossible to do so without talking about out.
Speaker 9 (41:01):
Rose Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's only daughter. I think there's
the argument to be made that in this cast of
people who created the books, she was the most influential
and the most complicated. Rose Wilder Lane. She hung out
(41:25):
with the Lost Generation in Paris. She was a foreign
correspondent in Albania. She wrote biographies of Herbert Hoover, Charlie
Chaplin and Jack London, and was sued by all of
their widows for misinformation. Some people think she founded the
Libertarian Party. It's impossible to talk about Laura without talking
about Rose, and it's impossible to talk about the Little
(41:47):
House books without acknowledging Rose's input. And that's what we're
going to do next week. If you think you knew
everything there was to know about Little House, hang on
to your bonnets. Rose Wilder is written and hosted by
Me Glennis McNichol. Our story editors are Joe Piazza and
(42:10):
Emily Maronoff. Our senior producer is Emily Maroanoff. Our producers
are Mary Dow and Sheena Ozaki. Our associate producer is
Lauren Phillip. Production help from Jessica Crinchich, Sound design and
mixing by Amanda Rose Smith. Our scene in additional music
was composed by Elise McCoy. We are executive produced by
Joe Piazza, Nikki tor, Ali Perry and me. Special thanks
(42:34):
to the lor Ingles Wilder Historic Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri.
Thanks to Charlie Aster and all the other kids actual
and Young at Heart who told us why they loved
the lor Ingles books so much. Thank you to CDM Studios.
Please see our show notes if you want to know
more about the people we interviewed, the places we visited,
the books we mentioned. You can also find our contact
(42:56):
and fel there. If you want to write to us
with your own thoughts and questions. Follow us on Instagram
at Wilder Underscore podcast and on TikTok at Wilder Podcast,
where you can see behind the scenes footage from all
our travels. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.
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