A wilder rose

Summary: In 1928, Rose Wilder Lane -- world traveler, journalist, much-published magazine writer -- returned from an Albanian sojourn to her parents' Ozark farm. Almanzo Wilder was 71, Laura 61, and Rose felt obligated to stay and help. To make life easier, she built them a new home, while she and Helen Boylston transformed the farmhouse into a rural writing retreat and filled it with visiting New Yorkers. Rose sold magazine stories to pay the bills for both households, and despite the subterranean tension between mother and daughter, life seemed good. Then came the Crash. Rose's money vanished, the magazine market dried up, and the Depression darkened the nation. That's when Laura wrote her autobiography, "Pioneer Girl," the story of growing up in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, on the Kansas prairie, and by the shores of Silver Lake. The rest -- the eight remarkable books that followed -- is literary history. But Laura's stories were publishable only with Rose's expert rewriting. Based on Rose's unpublished diaries and Laura's letters, A Wilder Rose tells the true story of the decade-long, intensive, and often troubled collaboration that produced the Little House books -- the collaboration that Rose and Laura deliberately hid from their agent, editors, reviewers, and readers. Why did the two women conceal their writing partnership? And what happened in those years to change Rose from a left-leaning liberal to a passionate Libertarian?

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