Rose Wilder Lane (December 5, 1886,
De SmetDe Smet is a city in and the county seat of Kingsbury County, South Dakota, United States. The population was 1,164 at the 2000 census. It was named for Father Pierre De Smet, a 19th century Jesuit missionary....
,
Dakota TerritoryThe Territory of Dakota was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from March 2, 1861, until November 2, 1889, when that final extent of the territory was split and admitted to the Union as the states of North and South Dakota....
– October 30, 1968,
Danbury, ConnecticutDanbury is a city in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. It has an estimated population of 78,736. Danbury is the fourth largest city in Fairfield County and is the seventh largest city in Connecticut....
) was an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
journalistA journalist is a person who practises journalism, the gathering and dissemination of information about current events, trends, issues, and people while striving for viewpoints that are not biased.Reporters are one type of journalist...
, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist. She is noted (with
Ayn RandAyn Rand , was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her best-selling novels and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism....
and
Isabel PatersonIsabel Paterson was a Canadian-American journalist, author, political philosopher, and leading literary critic of her day...
) as one of the founding mothers of the American
libertarian movementThe libertarian movement consists of the various individuals and institutions who expound or promote the ideas and causes of libertarianism.-Libertarian institutions and prominent individuals:...
and is also considered one of the seminal forces behind the American
Libertarian PartyThe Libertarian Party is a United States political party founded on December 11, 1971.In the 30 states where voters can register by party there are over 200,000 voters registered with the Libertarian Party, making it one of the largest of America's alternative political parties...
.
Early life and schooling
Rose Wilder Lane was the first child of
Laura Elizabeth IngallsLaura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was an American author who wrote the Little House series of children's books based on her childhood in a pioneer family.-Early life and marriage:...
and
Almanzo WilderAlmanzo James Wilder was the husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder and father of Rose Wilder Lane, both noted U.S. authors.- Early life :...
(and their only child to survive into adulthood). Lane's early years were difficult ones for her parents, the result of successive crop failures, illnesses and chronic economic hardships. During her childhood, Lane moved with her family several times, living with relatives in
MinnesotaMinnesota is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. The twelfth largest state by area in the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.2 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the...
and then
FloridaFlorida is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States, bordering Alabama to the northwest and Georgia to the north. It was the 27th state admitted to the United States...
, briefly returning to
De Smet, South DakotaDe Smet is a city in and the county seat of Kingsbury County, South Dakota, United States. The population was 1,164 at the 2000 census. It was named for Father Pierre De Smet, a 19th century Jesuit missionary....
, before the family finally settled in
Mansfield, MissouriMansfield is a city in Wright County, Missouri, United States. The population was 1,349 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Mansfield is located at ....
, in 1894, where her parents eventually established a dairy and fruit farm. Lane attended high schools in Mansfield and
Crowley, LouisianaCrowley is a city in and the parish seat of Acadia Parish, Louisiana, United States. The population was 14,225 at the 2000 census. The city is noted for its annual International Rice Festival. Crowley has the nickname of "Rice Capital of America", because at one time it was a major center for...
, (where her father's sister, Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer, had settled), graduating in 1904. Her intellect and ambition were demonstrated by her ability to compress three years of Latin into one, and by graduating at the top of her high school class in Crowley. Despite this academic success, her parents' financial situation placed college out of reach and her formal schooling was over.
Early career, marriage, divorce
After high school graduation she returned to her parents' farm and learned
telegraphyTelegraphy is the long-distance transmission of written messages without physical transport of letters. It is a compound term formed from the Greek words tele = far and graphein = write. Radiotelegraphy or wireless telegraphy transmits messages using radio...
at the Mansfield railroad station where the station master was the father of a school friend. Before she was eighteen Wilder was working for Western Union in
Kansas CityKansas City is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties. It is one of two county seats of Jackson County, the other being Independence, just to the city's east...
as a telegrapher. She worked as a telegrapher in Missouri, Indiana and California for the next five years.
In 1909, she married salesman and occasional newspaperman Claire Gillette Lane. Around 1910, Lane bore a son who was either stillborn or died shortly after birth. Complications from subsequent surgery appear to have left Lane unable to bear more children. The details of the child's death remain vague; the topic is mentioned only briefly in a handful of existing letters, written years later to express sympathy and understanding to close friends who were also dealing with the loss of a child.
For the next few years Lane and her husband traveled around the US working various marketing and promotional schemes. Letters to her parents described a happy-go-lucky existence with both Lane and her husband traversing the US several times and working a variety of jobs, both together and separately. However, in diary entries and subsequent published autobiographical pieces concerning this time, Lane described herself as depressed and disillusioned with her marriage, caught in the tension arising from the recognition that her intelligence and interests did not mesh with the life she was living with her husband. One account even had her attempting suicide by drugging herself with chloroform, only to awake with a headache and a renewed sense of purpose in life.
Keenly aware of her lack of a formal education, during this time Lane read voraciously and taught herself several languages. Her writing career began around 1910, with occasional free-lance newspaper jobs that earned much needed extra cash. Between 1912 and 1914, Lane - one of the earliest female real estate agents in California - and her husband sold farm land in what is now the
San JoseSan Jose or San José is the third-largest city in California and the tenth-largest in the United States. The county seat of Santa Clara County, it is located at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region commonly referred to as Silicon Valley...
/
Silicon ValleySilicon Valley is the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California, United States. The term originally referred to the region's large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now...
area of northern
CaliforniaCalifornia is the most populous state in the United States, and the third largest by area. California is the second most populous sub-national entity in the Americas, behind only São Paulo, Brazil...
. It made sense for the two to work separately to earn separate commissions, and Lane turned out to be the better salesperson of the two. The marriage foundered, there were several periods of separation, and eventually an amicable divorce. Lane's diaries reveal subsequent romantic involvements with several men in the years after her divorce, but she never remarried.
The threat of America's entry into
World War IWorld War I , also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance...
had seriously weakened the real estate market, so in early 1915 Lane accepted a friend's offer of a stopgap job as an editorial assistant on the staff of the San Francisco
Bulletin. The stopgap turned into a watershed. She immediately caught the attention of her editors not only through her talents as a writer in her own right, but also as an extremely skillful editor for other writers. Before long, Rose Wilder Lane's photo and byline were running in the
Bulletin daily. She easily churned out formulaic romantic fiction serials that would run for weeks at a time. Her accounts of the lives of
Henry FordHenry Ford was the American founder of the Ford Motor Company and father of modern assembly lines used in mass production. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. He was a prolific inventor and was awarded 161 U.S. patents...
,
Charlie ChaplinSir Charles Spencer Chaplin, KBE was an English comedic actor and film director. Chaplin became one of the most famous actors as well as a notable filmmaker, composer and musician in the early to mid Classical Hollywood era of American cinema.Chaplin acted in, directed, scripted, produced and...
,
Jack LondonJack London was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea Wolf along with many other popular books...
, and
Herbert HooverHerbert Clark Hoover was the 31st President of the United States . Hoover was a professional mining engineer and author. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted government intervention under the rubric "economic...
(who became a lifelong friend) were published in book form.
Also in 1915, Lane's mother,
Laura Ingalls WilderLaura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was an American author who wrote the Little House series of children's books based on her childhood in a pioneer family.-Early life and marriage:...
, visited for several months. Together they attended the Panama-Pacific International Exposition; many details of this visit and Lane's daily life in 1915 are preserved in Wilder's letters to her husband and are available in
West From HomeWest From Home is the last original "Little House" book by American author Laura Ingalls Wilder. It consists of Wilder's letters to her husband Almanzo Wilder during her visit to their daughter Rose Wilder Lane in San Francisco in 1915....
, published by Lane's heir in 1974. Although Lane's diaries indicate she was separated from her husband in 1915, Wilder's letters do not indicate this. Gillette Lane was recorded as living with his wife, although unemployed and looking for work during his mother-in-law's two month visit. It seems the separation was either covered up for her mother's visit, or had not yet involved separate households.
Launches free-lance writing career
By 1918, Lane's marriage was officially ended and she had quit her job with the
San Francisco Bulletin to launch a career as a free-lance writer. From this period through the early 1940s, Lane's work regularly appeared in leading publications such as
Harper's,
Saturday Evening Post,
Sunset,
Good Housekeeping, and
Ladies' Home Journal. Several of her short stories were nominated for O. Henry Prizes and a few novels became top sellers.
Rose Wilder Lane was also the first biographer of
Herbert HooverHerbert Clark Hoover was the 31st President of the United States . Hoover was a professional mining engineer and author. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted government intervention under the rubric "economic...
, writing
The Making of Herbert Hoover in 1920 in collaboration with Charles K. Field, editor of
Sunset magazine. She was a friend and defender of Hoover for the remainder of her life, and many of her personal papers are now in the Rose Wilder Lane Collection at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa. Lane's papers contain little actual correspondence between Hoover and herself, but the Hoover Post-Presidential Individual series contains a file of Lane correspondence that spans from 1936-1963.
In the late 1920s, she was reputed to be one of the highest-paid female writers in America, and counted among her friends figures such as
Herbert HooverHerbert Clark Hoover was the 31st President of the United States . Hoover was a professional mining engineer and author. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted government intervention under the rubric "economic...
,
Sinclair LewisHarry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." His works...
,
Dorothy ThompsonDorothy Thompson was an American journalist, who was noted by Time magazine in 1939 as one of the two most influential women in America, the other being Eleanor Roosevelt....
and
Lowell ThomasLowell Jackson Thomas was an American writer, broadcaster, and traveller best known as the man who made Lawrence of Arabia famous...
. Despite this success, Lane's compulsive generosity with her family and friends often found her strapped for cash and forced to work on material that paid well, but did not engage her growing interests in political theory and world history. She suffered from periodic bouts of self-doubt and
depressionMajor depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities...
in mid-life, diagnosing herself as manic-depressive (now more commonly known as
bipolar disorderBipolar disorder, also known as manic depressive disorder, manic depression or bipolar affective disorder, is a serious mental disorder that describes a category of mood disorders defined by the presence of one or more episodes of abnormally elevated mood clinically referred to as mania or, if...
). During these times of depression, when she was unable to move ahead with her own writing, Lane would easily find work as a ghostwriter or "silent" editor for other well-known writers.
Lane's occasional work as a traveling war correspondent began with a stint with the
American Red CrossThe American Red Cross is a humanitarian organization that provides emergency assistance, disaster relief and education inside the United States, and is the designated U.S...
Publicity Bureau in post-WWI Europe and continued though 1965, when at the age of 78, she was reporting from
VietnamVietnam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam , is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea to the east...
for
Woman's Day magazine, providing "a woman's point of view." She traveled extensively in Europe and Asia as part of the Red Cross. In 1926, Lane,
Helen Dore BoylstonHelen Dore Boylston was the American author of the popular "Sue Barton" nurse series and Carol Page actor series....
and their French maid traveled from France to Albania in a car they had named "Zenobia". An account of the journey,
Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford was published in 1983. Lane became enamored with
AlbaniaAlbania , officially the Republic of Albania , is a Mediterranean country in South Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Montenegro to the north, Kosovo to the northeast, Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south-east...
, and lived there for several long periods during the 1920s, spaced between sojourns to Paris and her parents' Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. She informally adopted a young Albanian boy named Rexh Meta, who she claimed saved her life on a dangerous mountain trek; she later sponsored his education at Oxford University in England.
In 1928, Lane returned to the U.S. to live on her parents' farm and there she took in and educated two local orphaned brothers. In 1938, Lane purchased a rural home outside of
Danbury, ConnecticutDanbury is a city in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. It has an estimated population of 78,736. Danbury is the fourth largest city in Fairfield County and is the seventh largest city in Connecticut....
, where she spent the remainder of her life.
Literary collaboration
Lane's exact role in her mother's famous
Little House series of books has remained unclear. A contributing factor was the stock market crash of 1929, which wiped out both Lane's and her parents' investments. The ensuing
Great DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
further reduced the market for her writing, and she found herself isolated and depressed at Rocky Ridge Farm, struggling to maintain her commitments to support herself, her adopted children and her elderly parents, who had retired from active farming with Lane's encouragement and financial support. Her ghostwriting jobs increased at this time, because her depression tended to affect her ability to generate ideas for her own writing projects.
In late 1930, her mother approached her with a rough manuscript outlining her hardscrabble pioneer childhood. Lane, using her well-developed sense of what was marketable, took notice. She recognized that an American public weary of the Depression would respond warmly to the story of the loving, self-sufficient and determined Ingalls family overcoming obstacles while maintaining their sense of independence, as told through the eyes of the spunky Laura as she matured from ages five to eighteen.
It is unclear whether Laura Ingalls Wilder was a naturally skilled novelist who somehow never discovered her own talents until her sixties, with Lane's only contribution to her mother's success her encouragement and her established connections in the publishing world, or if Lane essentially took her mother's unpublishable raw manuscripts in hand and completely (and silently) ghostwrote the series of books we know today. The truth appears to lie somewhere between these two positions — Wilder's writing career as a rural journalist and credible essayist began more than two decades before the
Little House series, and Lane's formidable editing and ghostwriting skills are well-documented. The existing evidence (including ongoing correspondence between the women concerning the development of the multi-volume series, Lane's extensive personal diaries detailing the time she spent working on the manuscripts, and Wilder's own initial draft manuscripts) tends to reveal an ongoing mutual collaboration that involved Lane more extensively in the earlier books, and to a much lesser extent by the time the series ended, as Wilder's confidence in her own writing ability increased, and Lane was no longer living at Rocky Ridge Farm. Lane insisted to the end that she considered her role to be little more than that of an adviser to her mother, despite much documentation to the contrary. Wilder did not keep copies of her correspondence with Lane, but Lane kept carbon copies of virtually everything she ever wrote—including the correspondence with her mother concerning the Little House Books. The correspondence shows that Wilder sometimes adamantly refused to accept some of her daughter's suggestions, and at other times gratefully accepted them.
Lane's editing and ghostwriting skills brought the dramatic pacing, literary structure, and characterization needed to make the stories publishable in book form. In fact, this collaboration benefited Lane's career as much as her mother's many of Lane's most popular short stories and her two most commercially successful novels were written at this time and were fueled by material which was taken directly from her mother's recollections of Ingalls-Wilder family folklore—
Let the Hurricane Roar (later retitled
Young Pioneers) and
Free Land, both addressed the difficulties of homesteading in the Dakotas in the late 1800s, and how the "free land" in fact cost many homesteaders their life savings.
The Saturday Evening PostThe Saturday Evening Post is a bimonthly American magazine. While the publication traces its historical roots to Benjamin Franklin and The Pennsylvania Gazette first published in 1728, The Saturday Evening Post, rechristened under new ownership in 1821 as a four-page newspaper, eventually became...
paid Lane large fees to serialize both novels, and both were also adapted for highly popular radio performances.
Columnist for a black newspaper: The Pittsburgh Courier
During World War II, Lane had one of the most remarkable, but little studied, phases of her career.
From 1942 to 1945, she wrote a weekly column for
The Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely read American black newspaper. Through it, she reached several times more readers than just about anything else she wrote during this period. Each issue had a circulation of 270,000 while the total print run of
The Discovery of Freedom during Lane’s lifetime was only about one thousand.
Rather than hiding or trimming her laissez faire views, she seized the chance to sell them to the readership. She sought out topics of special interests of her audience. Her first entry glowingly characterized the Double V Campaign as part of the more general fight for individual liberty in American history. "Here, at last, is a place where I belong," she wrote of her new job. "Here are the Americans who know the value of equality and freedom." Her columns highlighted black success stories to illustrate broader themes about entrepreneurship, freedom, and creativity. In one, she compared the accomplishments of Robert Vann and Henry Ford. Vann’s rags to riches story illustrated the benefits in a "capitalist society in which a penniless orphan, one of a despised minority can create
The Pittsburgh Courier and publicly, vigorously, safely, attack a majority opinion" while Ford’s showed how a poor mechanic can create "hundreds of jobs ... putting even beggars into cars."
She combined advocacy of laissez faire and antiracism. The views she expressed on race were remarkably similar to those of black writer, and fellow individualist,
Zora Neale HurstonZora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.-Early life:Hurston was the fifth of eight...
. Lane's columns emphasized the arbitrariness of racial categories and stressed the centrality of the individual. Instead of indulging in the "ridiculous, idiotic and tragic fallacy of 'race,' [by] which a minority of the earth's population has deluded itself during the past century", it was time for all Americans (black and white) to "renounce their race". Judging by skin color was comparable to the Communists who assigned guilt or virtue on the basis of class. In her view, the fallacies of race and class hearkened to the "old English-feudal ‘class’ distinction." The collectivists, including the New Dealers, were to blame for filling "young minds with fantasies of 'races' and 'classes' and 'the masses,' all controlled by pagan gods, named Economic Determinism or Society or Government."
The Discovery of Freedom
Around 1940, despite continuing requests from editors for both fiction and non-fiction material, Lane turned away from commercial writing and became known as one of the more influential American libertarians of the middle 20th century. She vehemently opposed the
New DealThe New Deal was the name that United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave to his complex package of economic programs 1933-36 with the goals of what historians call the 3 Rs, of giving Relief to the unemployed and badly hurt farmers, Reform of business and financial practices, and promoting...
, creeping
socialismSocialism refers to various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with a method of compensation based on...
, Social Security, wartime rationing and all forms of taxation, claiming she ceased writing highly paid commercial fiction in order to protest paying
income taxAn income tax is a tax levied on the income of individuals or business . Various income tax systems exist, with varying degrees of tax incidence. Income taxation can be progressive, proportional, or regressive. When the tax is levied on the income of companies, it is often called a corporate tax,...
es. She cut her income and expenses to the bare minimum, and lived a modern-day version of her ancestors' pioneer life on her rural land near
Danbury, ConnecticutDanbury is a city in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. It has an estimated population of 78,736. Danbury is the fourth largest city in Fairfield County and is the seventh largest city in Connecticut....
.
A staunch opponent of
communismCommunism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human...
after experiencing it first hand in the
Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
during her Red Cross travels, she wrote the seminal
The Discovery of Freedom (1943), and tirelessly promoted and wrote about individual freedom, and its impact on humanity. As Lane grew older, her political opinions solidified as a fundamentalist libertarian, and her defense of what she considered to be basic American principles of liberty and freedom could become harsh and abrasive in the face of disagreement.
Later years
During the late 1940s and through the 1950s, Lane played a hands-on role in launching the "libertarian movement", a term she apparently coined. She wrote book reviews for the National Economic Council and later for the Volker Fund, out of which grew the Institute for Humane Studies. Later, she lectured at, and gave generous financial support to, the Freedom School headed by libertarian Robert LeFevre.
With her mother's death in 1957, use of the Rocky Ridge Farm house reverted to the farmer who had earlier bought the surrounding land. The local townfolk put together a non-profit corporation to purchase the house and its grounds, for use as a museum. After some wariness at the notion of seeing the house rather than the books themselves be a shrine to her mother, Lane came to believe that making a museum of it would draw long-lasting attention to the books. She donated the money needed to purchase the house and make it a museum, agreed to make significant contributions each year for its upkeep and also gave many of the family's belongings to help establish what became a popular museum which still draws thousands of visitors each year to Mansfield. Her lifetime inheritance of Wilder's growing
Little House royalties put an end to Lane's self-enforced modest lifestyle; she began to travel extensively again, and thoroughly renovated and remodeled her Connecticut home. Also during the 1960s, Lane revived her own commercial writing career by publishing several popular magazine series, including one about her remarkable tour of the
Vietnam warThe Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was a Cold War military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1959 to 30 April 1975...
zone in late 1965.
Lane wrote an immensely popular book detailing the history of American needlework (with a strong libertarian undercurrent) for
Woman's Day and edited and published
On The Way Home, providing an autobiographical setting around her mother's original 1894 diary of their six week journey from South Dakota to Missouri. This book was intended to serve as the capstone to the
Little HouseLittle House on the Prairie is a children's book by Laura Ingalls Wilder that was published in 1935. It is part of a series of books known collectively as the Little House series....
series, for those many fans who since Wilder's death were now writing to Lane asking, "what happened next?". She contributed book reviews to the influential William Volker Fund, and continued to work on extensive revisions to
The Discovery of Freedom, which she never completed.
Lane was the adoptive "grandmother" and mentor to
Roger MacBrideRoger Lea MacBride was a U.S. lawyer, political figure, and television producer. He was the presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party in the 1976 election....
, best known as the Libertarian Party's 1976 candidate for President of the United States. MacBride was the son of one of Lane's editors with whom she formed a close bond when he was a young boy; she later admitted that she was grooming him to be a future Libertarian thought leader. In addition to being her close friend, he also became her attorney and business manager and ultimately the heir to the
Little House series and the multi-million dollar franchise that he built around it after Lane's death. MacBride was the author of the spinoff
The Rose Years Little House Series, a multi-part semi-fictional re-telling of Rose's life from the age of seven to nineteen.
The last of the many protégés to be taken under Lane's wing was the sister of her Vietnamese interpreter; impressed by the young girl's intelligence, she helped to bring her to the United States and sponsored her enrollment in college.
Lane died in her sleep at the age of eighty-one, on October 30, 1968, just as she was about to depart on a three-year world tour. Ten years after her passing,
ABCAmerican Broadcasting System, Inc. was the corporate entity created by Edward J. Noble to purchase the assets of the Blue Network, a radio network that was being divested by the National Broadcasting Company under pressure from anti-trust regulators....
ran a three-episode
miniseriesA miniseries , in a serial storytelling medium, is a production which tells a story in a pre-planned limited number of episodes. The exact number is open to interpretation; however, they are usually limited to fewer than a whole season. The term "miniseries" is generally a North American term...
The Young PioneersThe Young Pioneers is a three-episode ABC western television series starring Linda Purl and Roger Kern in the role of young newlyweds Molly and David Beaton, who settle in the Dakota Territory during the 1870ss...
, starring
Linda PurlLinda Purl is an American actress and singer, best known for portraying Ben Matlock's daughter Charlene Matlock in the first season of Matlock.-Early life and education abroad:...
and Roger Kern as newlyweds in the
Dakota TerritoryThe Territory of Dakota was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from March 2, 1861, until November 2, 1889, when that final extent of the territory was split and admitted to the Union as the states of North and South Dakota....
during the
1870sThe 1870s continued the trends of the previous decade, as new empires and an increase in imperialism and militarism rise in Europe and Asia. Germany declares independence in 1871 and begins its Second Reich. Labor unions and strikes occur worldwide in the later part of the decade, and continue...
and based on a compilation of Lane's novels.
About Lane
- Holtz, William V., 1995. The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane. University of Missouri Press. More.
- ———, ed., 1991. Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship Letters, 1921-1960. University of Missouri Press. More.
- Lauters, Amy Mattson, 2007. "The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist." University of Missouri Press. http://www.umsystem.edu/upress/spring2007/lauters.htm.
- Beito, David T. Beito and Beito, Linda Royster. “Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on War, Race, the State, and Liberty Independent Review
Several magazines, journals, and newspapers have used this title, some of which are:*Independent Review , a now defunct progressive English journal founded, in part, by the historian G.M. Trevelyan in London. Edward Jenks was editor, and members of its editorial board included Trevelyan, G. Lowes...
12 Spring 2008).
- Miller, John E., 1998. Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder. University of Missouri Press. Contains extensive material on Rose and Laura's literary collaboration, including facsimiles of their correspondence.
External links
- Works by Rose Wilder Lane at Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of the World Wide Web....
- Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968), from the Cato Institute
The Cato Institute is a pro-free market, libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C.The Institute's stated mission is "to broaden the parameters of public policy debate to allow consideration of the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, free...
.
- Rose Wilder Lane: Pioneer of Liberty, by Amy Lauters, from Legacy.com.