1932–1937
The publication of Laura's first book in 1932 at the age of sixty-five transformed her life. Henceforth she would be known primarily not as “Laura Wilder” or “Bessie Wilder” or “Mrs. A. J. Wilder.” To her thousands—and eventually millions—of admiring fans, she would be “Laura Ingalls Wilder.” Her identity now rotated less around her roles as farm wife, club member, or small-town citizen and more around her status as a widely acclaimed and increasingly popular author of children's novels. During the next eleven years, as seven more books were published, young people wrote to her begging for more stories of her childhood on the frontier, and librarians and schoolteachers installed her in their literary pantheon.
Popular success came immediately with the publication of her first book. Following the praise showered on the manuscript by Marion Fiery at Knopf and Virginia Kirkus at Harper and Brothers and designation of the book by the Junior Literary Guild as its April 1932 selection, Little House in the Big Woods received strong recommendations from reviewers. Praising the story's “refreshingly genuine and lifelike quality,” the New York Times observed that its characters were “very much alive” and that the portrait of Pa, especially, was drawn “with loving care and reality.” Atlantic Bookshelf called the story “delightful and absorbing.” Books urged that it be read by all Middle Border children and by many others. “Too few, nowadays, can tell as real and treasurable a story,” the publication noted. “Moreover, this story is delightfully told.”1
Laura must have been pleased with all of the favorable attention. Not only was she now a published author, but the response was overwhelmingly positive. Although no notice of the book's appearance ran in the Mansfield Mirror, news of it must have spread rapidly around town. Laura now began to reap the prestige she wanted, and financial returns began to trickle in also, slowly at first, but accumulating to considerable proportions over time.
Rose, too, was pleased with her mother's success. When Marion Fiery had informed her in September about Knopf's decision to publish the book, she had written in her diary, “Am feeling grand.” Two months later, when Harper and Brothers took over the manuscript, the following entry appeared: “I am thankful.” Positive comments declined in frequency during the months preceding publication of Little House in the Big Woods; mostly the diary's pages recorded cries of pain and despair. In June, Rose raged, “I must leave here.” Two months later: “The whole situation is getting too much on my nerves and I don't sleep well.” In September: “Feeling dull & sunk” and “Feel stupid.” Then in November: “Accomplished nothing. Am bothered & worried by teeth.” Her final assessment of 1931 consisted simply of “Last year was catastrophic.”2
Rose's despondency flowed partly from health problems. Her teeth, especially, were plaguing her. Several times she went to St. Louis to have them worked on. At other times pains in her shoulders and legs left her feeling sick and tired. The final cutoff in late November of income from the Palmer account devastated her and dashed all hope that she would be able to depend on it without having to continue to grind out the kinds of stories she increasingly disliked. Within days, Helen Boylston packed up and headed back East, where it would be easier for her to support herself financially. Rose owed Troub about twenty-eight hundred dollars. Laura, upon hearing the news of the Palmer Company's failure, “took it very well, considering,” Rose noted in her diary. But money worries left Rose “sick with fear.” She did not know how she would pay her bills. Then a “begging letter” arrived from Laura's sister Grace in Manchester, South Dakota. She and her husband, Nate Dow, were growing desperate and did not know where to turn. Rose discussed the situation with her parents over dinner at her place. “Couldn't sleep til after midnight,” she recorded in her diary.” Six days later: “Had another panic all night.” And a couple of weeks after that: “Sick panic and was unable to do anything at all.”3
Even during this period of intense financial difficulty, however, considerable cash flowed through Rose's bank account. She had a great deal more to work with than did most Americans. In October a $1,200 check (minus 10 percent for her agent) arrived for the sale of “Immoral Woman” to Ladies’ Home Journal, and radio announcer Lowell Thomas sent her $500 in partial payment for ghostwriting a book for him. Next month, another $1,200 followed upon acceptance of “The Dog Wolf,” by Good Housekeeping. It all went toward reducing debts that she had accumulated. She continued to subsidize the Cambridge education of Rexh Meta, the young Albanian she had met in Albania, and to support her parents with annual income supplements. It seemed that no matter how much money Rose earned, there was never enough, and in 1932 her financial situation deteriorated even further as her magazine markets evaporated. Even when her stories sold, they brought in less money: between $500 and $750, rather than the $900 to $1,200 she had become accustomed to.4
Departing from her usual Ozark themes, Rose began working in October 1931 on a serial set on the Dakota prairies during the 1880s. Calling it “Courage,” she wanted to write it to exalt the resourcefulness and bravery of the frontier homesteaders, as typified by her grandparents, Charles and Caroline Ingalls. Stories that she had heard over and over again from her parents formed the basis for her short novel. Progress came slowly, however; she set the project aside several times before finally finishing it. Even before the appearance of Little House in the Big Woods in April, Laura brought Rose the draft of a new novel that she had written about Almanzo's childhood. Rose spent a week working on it in March, then continued to revise it during May and June, completing her work and typing it sometime between August 12 and 16. Her and her mother's writing careers were becoming increasingly intertwined. The editing job Rose did on the first novel had been desultory, but she either felt it necessary or simply decided that she wanted to spend more time working on the second one, Farmer Boy. After this, Rose would play a much larger role in editing and restructuring her mother's manuscripts. Meanwhile, her own writing began to depend much more heavily upon material given to her by her parents.5
For some time Rose had been growing increasingly frustrated at her inability to come up with new and compelling subjects for her writing. She possessed style and technique in abundance; subject matter was something else again. She never claimed that writing was particularly enjoyable; it was simply a job for her, she told people. But she could turn out an amazing number of pages when she was on track. The problem was that increasingly everything that she did left her feeling unfulfilled and empty. She judged her work to be merely clever—focused upon surfaces and inauthentic. Despite her many exciting adventures and travels that took her halfway around the world, Rose lacked the kinds of experiences that she believed would have served her well for fictionalizing. Her frustrating search for a compelling subject to write about derived from, and in turn contributed to, her deep-seated lack of personal identity. Although she remained unwilling to commit herself romantically to any single person after her divorce from Gillette, Rose retained a wide array of friends and corresponded regularly with many others. But she lacked the capacity to give unlimited love to anyone. After traveling to many exotic places and living on both coasts and in foreign countries, Rose did not have anyplace to call home. No place had earned her full commitment, nor any person. She seemed destined always to be dreaming of someplace else.
What drove Rose to write now about the Dakota frontier, after indicating earlier that the homesteading experience had never excited any interest in her, is hard to say. Possibly her parents’ trip back to De Smet for the annual Old Settlers’ Day celebration there on June 10, 1931, made her think about it. They had talked about going the previous year, when the town had its big fiftieth-anniversary celebration, but things had not worked out. Laura had found time, however, to write a poem for the occasion and had mailed it to editor Aubrey Sherwood, who published it in the De Smet News. It was titled “Dakota Prairies,” and, while somewhat more pretentious in language than that of many similar home-town versifiers, it did little to bring distinction upon its author:
Ever I see them in my mental vision
As first my eyes beheld them years agone,
Clad all in brown with russet shades and golden
Stretching away into the far unknown;
Never a break to mar their sweep of grandeur
From North to South, from East to West the same,
Save that the East was full of purple shadows,
The West with setting sun was all aflame;
Never a sign of human habitation
To show that man's domain was begun;
The only marks the footpaths of the bison
Made by the herds before their day was done.
The sky down-turned a brazen bowl to me,
And clanging with the calls of wild gray geese
Winging their way unto the distant Southland
To ’scape the coming storms and rest in peace.
Ever the winds went whispering o'er the prairies,
Ever the grasses whispered back again,
And then the sun dipped down below the skyline
And stars at just the outline of the plain.6
She signed the poem “Laura Ingalls Wilder,” no doubt to assist local folks who had known her and her family in identifying her. Seven years later, when she started writing about her Dakota-prairie experiences, she sounded many of the same themes and called up similar images: prairie vistas, flamboyant sunrises and sunsets, open spaces, wild geese, waving grass, and whispering winds. Unlike her poem, which asserted that “man's domain” on the prairie commenced with the arrival of white settlers, Laura's books did pay some attention to the original settlers of the prairies and plains, the Native Americans. Nevertheless, both early and late, she thought of the westward movement not as a conquering army, displacing an already well-established Indian presence on the land, but as a benign and progressive transformation that introduced the blessings of civilization to the region.
When Laura and Almanzo finally departed for South Dakota on June 6, 1931, Rose noted in her diary that she was “astounded to see them actually start on the trip.” Laura's manuscript had just been sent to the publisher a week and a half earlier, and all they could do at that point was wait for a response. Laura and Almanzo would be able to reacquaint themselves with old places and talk to old friends whom they had lost contact with for almost four decades. They traveled a route similar to the one that they had taken down to Missouri in 1894. What had required a month and a half to negotiate now took only several days, as Nero, their Airedale dog, rode with them on the car's running board.7
De Smet had, of course, undergone considerable change. Though many of the places they visited remained familiar to them, much was different. No buildings remained standing on their old tree claim north of town, and just a few of the trees they had planted had managed to survive. Grain was growing on the hill on the homestead where Rose had been born. They drove around to look at Spirit Lake and at the old family homestead. Grace helped Laura go through Caroline's and Mary's belongings, which were being stored in a room of the house on Third Street while it was being rented. (Mary had died in 1928.) Later Laura and Almanzo drove west to Keystone in the Black Hills, where they visited Carrie and went sightseeing.8
Back in Mansfield three weeks after starting their journey, both were happy to be home, telling Rose, “East, west, home's best.” She could respond only by thinking of how utterly complacent and dated her parents’ viewpoint seemed to her. Laura had kept a diary during at least part of the trip, but if returning to some of her old haunts had made her think more about her childhood, it did not lead her immediately to concentrate her writing energies on her adolescent years in De Smet. After Farmer Boy, Laura would write about her childhood chronologically, elaborating upon the episodes that she had written about in “Pioneer Girl.” Her third book would be set in Indian Territory in Kansas; not for another six years would she start writing about her Dakota experiences.9
Interestingly enough, Rose turned her attention to life in Dakota before her mother did, even interrupting her work on editing “Farmer Boy.” Toward the end of June 1932, she rode a bus to St. Louis to have some dental work performed. Upon returning to Mansfield, she set her mother's manuscript aside temporarily and put in five weeks of intense work on “Courage,” which she now was calling “Let the Hurricane Roar.” The new title derived from an old song that her mother remembered singing. Laura wrote Carrie to find out if she knew the words of the song. Day after day, while they suffered from the intense heat of July and early August in the Ozarks, Rose cranked out a story about a blizzard on the Dakota prairie. Some days, as she recorded it in her diary, the heat was merely “terrific”; at other times it was “devastating.” Mostly, there was no rain. Worse, Rose worried that there was no further income in sight for her. As her bank balance dwindled, she noted in her diary, “I am truly frightened.” A day later she escalated the adjective to “terrified.”10
No doubt much of the power in Rose's story about fortitude and courage on the frontier derived from her own fears and timidity in the face of financial disaster and other calamities. The years 1930 and 1931 had been difficult for her; 1932 and 1933 turned out to be even worse. She slid into despondency, worried about her finances, her writing career, her personal relationships, her teeth, her general health, her deteriorating looks, her advancing age, and the seeming shackles that tied her down to her parents. Living in the midst of many people, she was desperately lonely. She began to realize that there probably would be no more great loves in her life, and she was prepared to write off the opposite sex. Few of her acquaintances appeared very interesting to her; most of them seemed dull and “stupid” (the latter a term she applied frequently to herself). Having recently turned forty-five and depressed by her lack of accomplishment, she grew increasingly aware of her own mortality. Morbid thoughts about death and even suicide frequently overwhelmed her.
Rose was especially exasperated by the large amount of time she had to (or chose to) spend on her mother's second manuscript. She always resented things that seemed to reduce her personal freedom; this seemed to be just one more example of her mother's literally “tying her down.” Midway through revising “Farmer Boy,” Rose became acutely depressed. On May 29 she wrote in her journal, “I am old. I am alone, a failure, forgotten, here in this dull alien place, I am losing my teeth.” More to the point: “I am not leading my own life, because any life must coalesce around a central purpose, and I have none.” Two days later she wailed, “I am really a stupid person…. I am too childlike and simple. Other people doubtless understand each other's meaning & purposes well enough, but I continually keep pulling at mama's sleeve and yammering, ‘Mama, mama! answer me, please!’” Her resentment toward others “tying her down” was genuine, but she also realized that, having failed to locate any central purpose in her life, she often flailed about. On June 8 she arrived at an important realization: “My whole trouble was that I am not master of my material in writing my mother's second juvenile. It was a little job that seemed inconsequential—and is—and therefore it was able to do all this to me without my knowing it—The truth is that for better or worse, no matter how hopelessly a failure, I am a writer. I am a writer. Nothing else in the world is so important to me—to my own inner self—as writing is.” Because she had to spend so much time on her mother's material, she was unable to work on her own, a situation made all the worse by her assumption that her mother's work was essentially trivial. Laura, for her part, may not have been interested enough in what Rose was writing to actually sit down and read it. At least, Rose did not think so. In one of her cynical moods, she had written Guy Moyston, “Oh, it isn't hard to keep Mama Bess from reading my books. She never reads ‘em. She just likes to have ‘em around.”11
Very likely it was while working on her mother's manuscripts and talking to her parents about their traveling to De Smet that Rose began to think about writing a story located in Dakota. Now stories that they had related to her over the years could serve as background material, especially the incredible tales about the hard winter of 1880–1881, when De Smet and the other towns along the Chicago and North Western Railroad tracks were snowed in for months. The events of that winter had become almost legendary among those who had lived through it. These stories, passed on by her parents and filtered through Rose's lively imagination, inspired Let the Hurricane Roar. It, along with Free Land, published in 1938 and also based upon stories her parents had told her, became Rose's two most outstanding pieces of fiction. Thus, the collaboration that occurred between mother and daughter worked in mutually beneficial fashion: Laura lent Rose factual material to draw upon for her writing, while Rose lent her professional expertise to polish and edit Laura's writing.
Laura sometimes may have resented Rose's appropriation of stories that she and Almanzo had told her for use in her own fiction. After getting started on writing novels, Laura at least hoped that Rose would avoid using stories that she might want to make use of later. Once, upon glimpsing a newspaper advertisement for the book edition of Let the Hurricane Roar that identified the names of the leading characters as Charles and Caroline, Laura immediately assumed that Rose had used her parents as models in writing the book, and she appeared to be resentful of it. Generally, however, Laura was quite willing to help her daughter in any way that she could. A few years later, Almanzo helped Rose with her research in preparation for writing Free Land by filling out a long questionnaire that she had prepared for him, asking about specific details of farming and frontier life as he had known it back in the 1880s.12
A month after Rose sent the manuscript of “Hurricane” to George Bye, the Saturday Evening Post bought it for three thousand dollars, publishing it as a two-part serial in October 1932. Rose indicated that her purpose in writing the frontier romance transcended its ostensible subject matter; her real subject was the depression that the country was experiencing at the time. The story, Rose said in Better Homes and Gardens in December 1933, was intended as a reply to pessimists in the United States. “It was written,” she said, “from my feeling that living is never easy, that all human history is a record of achievement in disaster (so that disaster is no cause for despair), and that our great asset is the valor of the American spirit—the undefeated spirit of millions of obscure men and women who are as valiant today as the pioneers were in the past.”13
Despite the self-doubts that she spilled into her journals and diaries, Rose remained a fiercely individualistic person, proud of having made it “on her own.” In this way she reflected her parents’ own sternly independent spirits. Because Rose's and Laura's royalty checks arrived at opportune times, the family never had need of government relief. Somehow they managed to get by with little money. What they refused to acknowledge was that most families did not have the luxury of periodic checks arriving in the mail paying them hundreds or thousands of dollars, and many did need government handouts merely to survive. Rose and her parents, however, held fast to the belief that anyone with gumption and wit and a little persistence could make it without having to take government charity.
On August 12, immediately after depositing her serial in the mail, Rose resumed working on her mother's manuscript of “Farmer Boy.” Only four more days were needed to finish the task, and it was ready to be mailed on August 15. Despite the success of Laura's first book, however, Harper's initially turned the manuscript down. Book sales were plummeting, and they wanted more work done on the story to ensure healthy sales. Meanwhile, the country was sliding deeper and deeper into the economic doldrums, leaving millions of people destitute and desperate. Missouri suffered along with every other state. One advantage that many Ozarkians had, however, is that they were used to poverty and more self-sufficient than others.14
Manufacturing collapsed in Missouri after the stock crash; value added by the sector dropped 51 percent between 1929 and 1933. Unemployment statewide exceeded the national average, jumping to 16 percent of the labor force in 1930, 27 percent the following year, and 38 percent in both 1932 and 1933. The relief load was especially burdensome in the Ozarks. Among the hundreds of miles of railroad track that were abandoned in the state during the decade, the twelve-mile-long short line of the Ozark Southern Railroad between Mansfield and Ava was torn up and removed in 1935. Happily, Mansfield's two banks, the Farmers and Merchants Bank and the Bank of Mansfield, managed to weather the maelstrom and stay in business at a time when three hundred of their counterparts around the state were forced to close their doors.15
Farm receipts plummeted even faster than those of other products. The index of prices paid to farmers declined from 146 in 1929 to 65 in 1932. Farmland values nose-dived, along with agricultural prices, from an average of $53.23 per acre in 1930 to $31.36 per acre five years later. Drought compounded the agricultural problem, as devastating heat and lack of rain turned 1930, 1934, and 1936 into especially difficult years for farmers. Temperatures topping one hundred degrees wilted plants, livestock, and people for days on end. Springs and streams around Mansfield went dry. Crops burned up, and animals shriveled up and died. Almanzo had to haul water to the farm. In July 1934, Rose—her nerves on edge—was suffering from nausea and agonizing headaches. She wrote Adelaide Neall that everyone was on the verge of insanity. Further adding to people's miseries was an infestation of army worms and other pests that damaged crops, and worse.16
The depression drove Republicans for cover in Missouri, as elsewhere, and 1932 was a big year for the Democrats. Mansfield, traditionally safely in the Republican fold, granted New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt a slight margin over President Herbert Hoover in that year's election contest, 362 votes to 303 (54 percent to 46 percent). Democratic candidates for other offices obtained similar margins over their Republican opponents. Countywide, Roosevelt and his Democratic running mates did slightly better, garnering 56 percent of the vote, 8 percent less than he obtained in the state as a whole. It did not take long for historical patterns to reassert themselves, however. In the off-year elections in 1934, Mansfield reverted to form, casting only 33 percent of its ballots for Democratic newcomer Harry Truman, who obtained 59 percent statewide in a successful bid for the U.S. Senate. Straight-ticket voting continued to be the norm, as candidates for the various offices obtained almost identical vote totals. District Seven, which included Wright County, sent conservative Republican Dewey Short back to Congress in 1934, after a four-year hiatus, and for the next twenty-two years he vociferously spoke out against liberal, New Deal–type programs in Washington in terms virtually identical to the conservative, antigovernment rhetoric spouted by Rose Wilder Lane and her parents. In 1936, Roosevelt's big year nationwide (with 61 percent of the major party vote), he garnered only 37 percent in Mansfield and 41 percent in Wright County. Although compiling a victory margin of almost two to one statewide, the president trailed his opponent, Gov. Alf Landon, throughout most of the Ozarks region.17
Government programs initiated by President Roosevelt and Congress to try to cope with the problems brought on by the depression may have failed to convert most Ozarkians into Democratic voters, but the New Deal did exert a major impact on people's lives. A considerable number of farmers and unemployed workers obtained jobs under the auspices of the Public Works Administration, building roads and working on other construction projects. The Civil Works Administration pumped $17,500 into Wright County in November 1933, with $3,500 of the total set aside for Mansfield. Work-relief jobs continued to be provided under the massive Works Progress Administration (WPA) appropriation of 1935, while direct relief payments came to a halt early the following year. The most dramatic visual evidence of WPA activity in Mansfield was the new grade-school building that was erected at the end of 1936. Several dozen women obtained employment in WPA-sponsored sewing rooms and workshops in Mansfield, as well as in Hartville and Mountain Grove. Meanwhile, other programs, including the National Youth Administration, supplemented welfare families’ incomes in return for work done in the schools. Through early 1936, federal dispersals of relief funds totaled $265,000 in Wright County.18
Of the two major programs that were designed to foster economic recovery, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) made by far the bigger impact on the county. Its counterpart, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), had little impact because it exempted stores having five or fewer employees in towns of less than twenty-five hundred people. J. E. Craig became the chairman of the local NRA committee and went to a meeting in Springfield to be briefed on the organization's operations, but apparently the agency had little or no effect on Mansfield. The AAA and other agricultural programs, on the other hand, proved to be much more important in this mainly agricultural region. The program paid farmers to induce them to reduce their production in an effort to raise prices. County wheat committees were inaugurated in September 1933 to help administer allotment contracts. A corn-hog program was also set up. Missouri farm prices rose 80 percent between 1932 and 1937. During the summer of 1934, as drought and heat ravaged the area, a cattle-buying program went into effect, and emergency crop and feed loans also were extended.19
Like their good friend N.J. Craig, the Wilders remained loyal Democrats as late as the 1920s, but the philosophy behind Roosevelt's New Deal rubbed them the wrong way. The idea of granting government “handouts” to the needy and of extending the regulatory reach of federal agencies into local communities and businesses went against notions of individualism and self-reliance that they had grown up with. Although Laura had worked for almost a decade with the federally sponsored Farm Loan Association, now she, Almanzo, and Rose all perceived the intrusive hand of government as having become far too powerful and meddlesome.
Almanzo's knee-jerk reaction against government interference in people's lives was told humorously in a story that Rose related to Mark Sullivan, a literary friend. Because of the thin clay subsoil and hilly terrain on Rocky Ridge it was impossible to plow most of the acreage. Nevertheless, her father did like to turn up an acre or so of relatively level land for oats or millet for bird feed, and he also liked to grow a little popcorn for the family. One day while he was plowing with old Buck, his thirty-year-old Morgan, a young agent from the Department of Agriculture parked alongside the road and walked into the field to ask some questions about his farm operation. When he informed Almanzo that federal regulations prohibited him from planting more than two acres of oats, the farmer retorted that if the fellow did not immediately leave his property, he was going to go get his shotgun. The agent, who was writing this down, offered Almanzo an opportunity to change his words for the record. At that point the old man made his meaning perfectly clear, in Rose's telling of the story. He said, “God damn you, you get to hell off my land and you do it now. I'll plant whatever I damn please on my own farm, and if you're on it when I get to my gun, by God I'll fill you with buckshot.”20
As the 1930s wore on and government activities continued to expand, the family grew ever more resolute in their opposition to Roosevelt and his claque of New Dealers. Within weeks of the president's inauguration, Rose began referring to him as a dictator, and her parents agreed. All three of them mutually reinforced each other's suspicions about FDR and his minions. Rose eventually would devote her energies to attacking the direction in which the government was being taken by the liberals in Washington. In the meantime, she and Laura continued their literary pursuits, with their subject matter increasingly converging. But just as Laura was beginning to win some recognition for her children's novels, Rose was sinking into the depths of depression, burdened by a sense of personal powerlessness and inadequacy.21
Rose's journal entries during 1933 reveal her at her lowest point. Growing older, suffering from various health problems, lacking friends to whom she could fully relate, searching for some significant project that would elevate her above literary hackwork, and sensing that she would never discover love again, Rose turned morose and suicidal. At least some of her depressed state of mind revolved around frustrations emanating from her close proximity to her mother. They seemed to grate on each other's nerves when they lived too close to each other. Having to take precious time from her own writing to devote to her mother's books nagged at her, but her sense of duty compelled her to do it. Their main points of conflict revolved around money and power. Rose considered her mother to be manipulative in trying to extract money from her, even though she often showered her parents with expensive and not-always-wanted gifts, like the house that she built for them. Ultimately, power and control lay at the heart of their disagreements. Rose never had been quite able to cut the knot that bound her to her mother, and now, as she was approaching fifty, her mother still sometimes seemed to view her as a little girl, while Rose, for her part, seemed to want to establish her own control over her parents’ lives.
What Rose successfully hid from other people, she set down at length and in explicit detail on paper at night. Starting a journal in January 1933, she admitted, “So far, I am almost superlatively a failure. There has been no success in personal relationships, in adjustment to the world, in work, or in money.” Attempting to understand her own sense of failure, Rose pondered, “I have never really felt that I am I; I feel no identification with myself. My life is not my life, but a succession of short stories and one-act plays, all begun by chance and left unfinished.”22
Rose's years of living at Rocky Ridge had all been wasted. “Since 1927 I have spent most of my time and about $15,000 on it, without pleasure or any satisfaction. I do not like the place, I do not like to live here, and I see no prospect of ever leaving.” What may have prompted Rose to start writing this journal was her sense of being tied down to working on her mother's second novel, “Farmer Boy.” When Harper's asked for a revised version of the manuscript, Rose spent two and a half weeks in January 1933 working on it and then most of February retyping it. By March 2 she was finally finished. In the middle of all of this, her dog, who was named Mr. Bunting, was killed by a car. This, combined with all of her other worries and concerns, prompted long crying jags over the next several months. In addition, she was pessimistic about the likely sales of Let the Hurricane Roar, which had been published in book form. It should not have been too surprising, therefore, that she directed, either consciously or unconsciously, many of her accumulated frustrations against her mother.23
Rose did not count what she was doing for her mother as being important. “I am getting nothing whatever done,” she wrote in her journal on January 27. “Preparing to rewrite my mother's second juvenile, Farmer Boy. Work on it every day till teatime, going over first typed mss. with pen. Would like to finish it this month, but can't possibly. Meantime my own work stagnates: I do not even think about it.” Rose recognized “a curious half-angry reluctance” on her part to help other people with their writing: “I say to myself that whatever earnings there may be are all in the family. Also I seize upon this task as an excuse to postpone my own work. But there can be no genuine pleasure in generosity to my mother who resents it and does not trouble to conceal resentment.”24
Rose's journal became a record of her mental illness during her depressed period in 1933. Displaying great insight into her own personal pathology, Rose nevertheless found it difficult to translate self-knowledge into transformed behavior. A day after being traumatized by Mr. Bunting's death, she recorded, “I can not love. That's what's wrong with me. I give everything except real warmth, myself. Living is hell and all life is to be pitied.” One week later: “Why am I such a monster? I am a monster. I always have been. There is no true warmth in my nature. I have no heart.” In late March: “My mind is paralyzed, not any longer by fear and worry, but by exhaustion. Day after day, I am simply motionless. Not even waiting, any more.” At the end of the month: “I am mentally sick. Can't stop crying.” And one month later: “All these days I have been sick in my mind. I haven't yet stopped crying. I read all day and am ashamed because it is only a way of trying to escape.”25
During the midst of all this, Rose acknowledged the pent-up resentment that had been accumulating in her against her mother. Describing a scene that took place at her parents’ home on April 9, when Laura suggested that they turn off their electricity in order to cut down on expenses, Rose let all of her animus out. “It's amazing how my mother can make me suffer,” she wrote. “Implicit in every syllable and tone, the fact that I've failed, fallen down on the job, been the broken reed. But never mind, (brightly) she's able to manage nicely, thank you!” Once again, money—or Rose's impression that her mother was dunning her for money—triggered her outburst. She recognized that Laura was reaching out for some kind of companionship and wished she could be friends with her. Yet, in her view she had “not the faintest notion what she's doing to me…. She made me so miserable when I was a child that I've never got over it. I'm morbid. I'm all raw nerves. I know I should be more robust. I shouldn't let her torture me this way, and always gain her own ends, thro implications that she hardly knows she's using. But I can't help it.”26
Such words need to be considered in context and against Rose's own contradictions of them. She recognized herself that she was not thinking straight during this period of time. On May 20, she wrote in her journal, “I have been mentally sick ever since Bunting died. But quite suddenly one day I was whole again, though shaky. I am now almost sane once more.”27
Laura signed a contract for “Farmer Boy” that month. Harper's had agreed to take the new revised manuscript in March, two weeks after Rose mailed it, but at only a 5-percent royalty for the first three thousand copies and thereafter the standard 10 percent, which is what Laura had received for Little House in the Big Woods. Rose was upset at being forced to take the reduced rate, but she followed the recommendation of her agent, George Bye, who told her, “If you can get a first class publisher to take a routine seller like a juvenile, with little chance for a flash sale, these days, at only slightly offish terms, I'd accept.” By June 1 proofs were in hand, and Laura went to Rose's place to check them.28
Reviews again were favorable, although there were fewer this time. Calling the story of Almanzo “a delightful tale,” the Boston Transcript, like other publications, located its appeal in its faithful description of farm life before mechanization, radio, movies, and other modern trends transformed the rural way of life. The New York Times praised it as “a genuine bit of American life, vividly and charmingly described and centering about a very real and natural small boy.” Books noted, “Altogether there is reason to be grateful to Mrs. Wilder for another light thrown on our domestic past.”29
Even before Farmer Boy was published, Laura was working on another volume to carry her own story forward. She intended to focus on her family's brief stay on the Osage Indian Reserve in southeastern Kansas when she was only two or three years old. To try to pin down some of the facts and hazy details that had been lost to time, Laura and Rose began to research them, writing to libraries and historical societies and even making a trip to Kansas to see if they could find the location of the rude cabin where her family had lived. Let the Hurricane Roar, meantime, went into its third printing, and Publishers Weekly reported that it was a best-seller in Chicago. Rose worried that she should be taking advantage of momentum generated by the book's sales to get more short stories published, but she had a hard time getting started. “I should be giving editors pioneer stories,” she told herself. Working on her mother's first two novels and on her own Saturday Evening Post serial set in Dakota Territory had turned her attention toward the frontier. Both before and after publishing Hurricane, she recorded efforts to write a story she was calling “The Hard Winter,” and in 1937 she would rely on her parents’ accounts to write another Dakota pioneer story, Free Land. Now, however, she began to concoct a grandiose and highly unrealistic scheme for a multivolume novel that would chronicle the entire westward movement of the United States, with a great cast of characters representing all phases of American economic and social life. This would be a grand, sweeping panorama of national history, echoing American themes with which she now identified. The leftist critique of American values and mores that she had formulated during the early 1920s now gave way to celebration of them. It took her only a few days to realize that her fantastic plan was only a mirage. To some degree, however, her historical impulse found realization in the frontier novels that she helped her mother write, and several years later Rose would make another attempt at writing a historical book, this time about the state of Missouri.30
Apparently their writing activities led Laura and Rose to withdraw from most of their outside activities during the early 1930s. Whereas earlier the Mansfield Mirror had frequently recorded their presence at meetings of the Justamere Club, bridge parties, and various other social gatherings, now there was scarcely a reference. Laura's age as well as her need to work on her books would have figured prominently in her withdrawal from community activities. Not that the family became social recluses. They continued to entertain at home from time to time. The newspaper reported the visit of the family of Julian Bucher, who had spent summers with them when he was a boy, at “the beautiful country home” of the Wilders in September 1934. The J. W. Brentlingers spent a Sunday afternoon visiting the Wilders a month later. A former Mansfield boy, Ogden Riley of Peoria, Illinois, stayed with them while visiting old friends in and around town. And there certainly would have been other unreported visiting back and forth between the Wilders and their friends and neighbors. The Craigs continued to be valued friends, and Rose grew more and more attached to Corinne Murray, who shared many of her interests.31
Mostly, though, Laura, Almanzo, and Rose kept each other company, often walking back and forth across the ridge to each other's houses to talk, share meals, or take tea. The diary that Rose kept regularly from 1931 to 1935 chronicles the frequency of these visits, which waxed and waned depending on the weather, work schedules, and other factors. Mostly it was Laura and Rose getting together; less often Almanzo was involved. Waffles or pancakes and sausage might make breakfast. Laura invited Rose over to make doughnuts. Fried spring chicken was sometimes on the menu, or fresh greens out of the garden, or tapioca cream and sponge cake. Sometimes they saw each other every day; at other times maybe only once a week or less (assuming that Rose was fairly thorough in noting these encounters in her diary). Most commonly they got together two or three times a week. In addition, there was always the phone, and sometimes even Almanzo used it to call Rose.32
Laura and Almanzo owned a radio, and Rose came to listen to several of President Roosevelt's fireside chats, although the family was more interested in local gossip or things around the farm than politics. Sometimes they played chess or dominoes. They celebrated each other's birthdays, and at Christmastime they got together to trim a tree. Almanzo was known to shoot a game of pool, and now and then they drove or walked into town to take in a movie—maybe a Charlie Chan feature or Wallace Beery in Treasure Island or Pauline Lord in Mrs. Wiggs. They may have gone in to listen to Saturday-night band concerts on the square and probably attended some of the ceremonies and festivities around Memorial Day and Fourth of July.33
Often they drove to nearby towns to visit friends, shop, eat, or take in entertainment. Sometimes Corinne Murray or a friend from out of town went with them, or a group got together to visit some place such as the Shrine Mosque in Springfield. Cedar Gap, Mountain Grove, Seymour, Ava, and Hartville were short distances away. Sometimes they ventured farther out, traveling to Branson, or Crystal Lake, or down into northern Arkansas.
Rose's life changed dramatically when a fourteen-year-old orphan named John Turner showed up on her kitchen porch one cold, rainy afternoon in September 1933, offering to do some work in return for food. Rose responded to her mothering instinct and not only gave the boy a job weeding the flower bed but also took him into her home and nursed him and put him into the Mansfield high school. Later, upon discovering that John had an older brother named A1 who was still living on their uncle's farm near Ava, she took him in, too. Although the relationship between her and the boys was not always a smooth one, she discovered in them a new purpose for living. They helped restore in her a sense of fulfillment and nurturing, brightening her outlook on life. No longer expecting to find a loving relationship with a man, she invested her affectionate instincts in the boys, who partially reciprocated her feelings but who also could be a great frustration to her. At the end of the year she recorded in her journal, “John is a deep joy to me. There is endless interest, amusement, fascination, charm, in such a relationship with a child.”34
Even so, the year ended dismally for Rose. Much of her malaise flowed from her ambivalent attitudes toward her mother. “I want to keep on going but do not quite see how,” she wrote, “and there is no alternative—rather than justify my mother's 25-year dread of my ‘coming back on her, sick’ I must kill myself. If she has to pay funeral costs, at least she will cut them to the bone and I will not have to endure her martyrdom and prolong it by living.”35
It would be a wonderful thing if Laura had written and saved letters, diaries, and journals the way her daughter did. Had she done so, we could understand more about her thoughts and feelings as she wrote her novels. As it is, we can know in excruciating detail the innermost dreams and expectations, frustrations and suicidal wishes of Rose; about Laura's inner life we know relatively little. The most revealing evidence about her is to be found in her published writings—including her newspaper journalism—and in a few letters that have been preserved.
Laura finished her “Indian juvenile” on February 1, 1934. Afterward, the family drove to Mountain Grove, where they ate some “awful food in [an] awful restaurant,” in Rose's words, and went to see a movie, The Invisible Man, which Rose described as “rotten.” But they all had “a gay, noisy time” driving home. Laura had worked on the manuscript during the second half of 1933. In this, her second autobiographical volume, she directly confronted the presence of Indians on the frontier. The story revolves around the family's moving to “Indian Territory” in Kansas and then being forced to leave when the federal government enforced the terms of a treaty with the Osage Indians by requiring white intruders who were squatting on the reserve to vacate. Although she had neglected to mention Indians in her first book about the allegedly “vast, empty forest” of northwestern Wisconsin, and while Indians were treated only marginally in her later narratives, Laura was not unaware of their presence on the frontier, and her thoughts about them were well-meaning, if often ambivalent.36
What is notable about Laura's attitudes toward Indians is not so much that they contained a considerable degree of narrow-mindedness and prejudice but that they, to some degree at least, transcended generally accepted notions that were held about racial inferiority and the Indians’ alleged backwardness. Wright County had few blacks residing in it. Most of them were concentrated near Hartville, where their annual picnic was a big event in the area. Missouri had been a slave state and was the site of a number of Civil War battles, including the Battle of Hartville in 1863. Not surprisingly, Missouri's white population, deriving from a largely southern background, by and large accepted common racial stereotypes imputing black inferiority. Some towns enforced traditions that blacks would not be allowed to settle in them. Bigoted language was commonplace, and the idea that the races were equal would have been considered radical in the extreme by most people. Within this context, Laura could have been forgiven for harboring some of the prevalent prejudices directed against blacks, Indians, and other minorities. Her religious training and the precepts of fairness and benevolence that her parents imparted to her inclined her toward a more enlightened viewpoint.37
Rose waited three and a half months before tackling her mother's “Indian story.” She was trying, with middling success, to churn out more of her own material, often running dry but managing to complete two short stories, “Hope Chest” and “Perfect House,” during the first part of 1934. It was only when she could not get started on another story that on May 20 she reluctantly turned to the task of working on her mother's novel. Laura stopped by after the first week to see how things were going, and Rose gave her a copy of what she had completed up to that time. The days were excruciatingly hot. Once Rose recorded the temperature at 125 degrees; the next day it was 135, breaking the thermometer. Laura was sick for a while, and once Rose walked the mile back and forth between the houses four times. Her eyes were giving her trouble, and she went to Springfield to have minor surgery on her eyelids. Most days, however, she managed to stick to the task, and by June 10 she had finished her revisions on her mother's manuscript. After an early dinner, they all walked into town to watch Clark Gable, William Powell, and Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama. After enjoying a day off from her labors, Rose took a little less than two weeks’ time to copy what they were calling “High Prairie” and to get it ready to mail to the publisher. The whole job took her five weeks; afterward there was nothing to do but wait for word from New York.38
Despite the heat, which continued to hover around 100 degrees, Rose made another short stab at writing “The Hard Winter” before finishing a story called “Object Matrimony,” which quickly was bought by the Saturday Evening Post for nine hundred dollars. She also worked on a story called “Old Fashioned Christmas” before deciding to escape the July heat by going with John Turner on a five-week rail vacation to Florida, arriving back home on August 27. She wrote more short stories by the end of the year, but Rose again grew restless, more than ever eager to escape Rocky Ridge. Her mother was getting on with her writing now, and Rose had the additional responsibility of taking care of Al and John, who soon would be ready to head off to college. On February 26, 1935, she wrote in her diary, “I can not stand this house, this sunk-in-the-muck way of living, any more. I must get out.”39
By the time that day finally arrived, Rose's departure from Mansfield had taken on a sense of inevitability, and the parting turned out to be not nearly so traumatic as she had imagined. In April she received an offer from the McBride Publishing Company to write a volume about Missouri for a series of state books that the company was in the process of publishing. At the time, Rose was just finishing a preface for a collection of short stories set in a fictionalized Mansfield that she had previously published. Longmans, Green, and Company was publishing the collection under the title Old Home Town. The McBride offer seemed especially enticing to Rose, since she had increasingly been turning her attention toward history. A state-oriented book would allow her to develop some of her ideas about how history should be written with regard to a single state about which she possessed some personal feeling and knowledge. The fifteen-hundred-dollar advance offered by the company also attracted her. Rose started researching the book in mid-May by reading books and taking notes about Missouri history at home, but she quickly concluded that to do a decent job she would need to use a good research library, like the one at the State Historical Society in Columbia. Thus, the decision was made to go live in the college town for an extended period of time while she did the necessary research. It was easier for her to move out under the circumstances, since neither she nor her parents realized that she would never return to live with them.40
Laura decided to ride with Rose and Corinne Murray on July 20 for the 170-mile drive to Columbia, where Rose installed herself in a room downtown in the Tiger Hotel. From there, it was only a few minutes’ walk to the State Historical Society Library on the University of Missouri campus. Laura and Corinne drove home the next day. Life would be different for Laura and Almanzo without Rose, who had been living at Rocky Ridge for the previous seven and a half years. Only later would they all come to understand that she had left the place for good. Rose bought a secondhand Ford to travel around the state to gather material for her book, and Corinne Murray drove back to Columbia to accompany her on the trip. Unfortunately, the anecdotal, historical manuscript that Rose produced for the McBride Company did not meet their expectations. They had more of a contemporary travel book in mind, and her manuscript never was published. The better part of a year that she had spent working on it was wasted.41
Laura's third book, whose title had gone from “High Prairie” to Little House on the Prairie, appeared toward the end of September 1935. Ida Louise Raymond at Harper and Brothers had sent it to a Midwestern librarian for evaluation before deciding whether to publish it. The librarian who read the manuscript liked it very much. As soon as copies were available, Laura gave one to the Mansfield Mirror, and they printed a story about it on the front page. Once again reviewers were quick with praise for the book and for the illustrations of Helen Sewell, which were described as “childlike and inviting” by one reviewer and “just right” by another. “Furiously interesting,” M. L. Becker called the book. Families should sit down and read it aloud, Books suggested. “Mrs. Wilder has caught the very essence of pioneer life, the satisfaction of hard work, the thrill of accomplishment, safety and comfort made possible through resourcefulness and exertion,” the New York Times reviewer wrote. “She draws, too, with humor and with understanding, the picture of a fine and courageous family, who are loyal and imaginative in their relationships to one another.”42
During late 1935 and early 1936 Laura worked on a fourth volume, this one about the family's stays in Minnesota. She skipped over the interlude in Burr Oak, Iowa, perhaps because the memory of that period when her little brother, Freddie, died was too painful, perhaps because describing the move away from Walnut Grove and back again would complicate the story too much. Instead, she wrote it as if they had simply lived in Minnesota once. Writing in the middle of the Great Depression and during some of the worst drought and heat the country had ever experienced, Laura must have felt a sense of déjà vu in describing the difficulties of pioneer life in Minnesota during the 1870s. The challenges facing the family had included drought, grasshoppers, prairie fires, and crop failure, similar in many ways to the devastation wrought by the hard times of the 1930s, with its dust storms, insect invasions, and market collapse.
Rose, in Columbia, had the manuscript in hand by the end of March 1936, but she put it aside for the time being. “Have to finish my mother's goddam juvenile, which has me stopped flat,” she noted in her diary on May 10. In June and July she finally tackled it. This was the first volume that Laura had written without Rose being nearby for consultation. Now the revision process would have to take place at a distance, with letters passing back and forth between them. Not surprisingly, Rose resented the demands on her time occasioned by her mother's book. Once again her own material was selling well, which was encouraging. She earned $9,717 (minus commissions of $946) for her efforts that year, her best performance since 1926.43
The kinds of things that mother and daughter previously would have discussed over tea or breakfast now had to be taken care of in letters. Laura depended on Rose's judgment almost entirely to make the necessary modifications. To aid in the process of revision, Rose constructed a series of detailed questions about food, clothing, furniture, buildings, and a dozen other things that they both wanted to get right and to be understandable to their readers. The collaborative process that continued to develop between the two was not simply a one-way street, with Rose in the driver's seat; both were intimately involved in the process. Working together at such a distance was hard, but they managed. After several weeks at the task, Laura sent a list of suggested cuts and modifications, telling her daughter that it would be better if Rose made the changes on the version that she had in her possession. “I have no copy of the thing here that I can go over,” Laura explained. “If I should try to use the first scraps of scribbling, I would get us all confused for I changed it so much from them. That makes it hard for me to tell you where to cut.”44
Laura made a map depicting Plum Creek and its relation to other landmarks, including their original dugout, the new house that her father had built for them, the stable, the swimming hole, the fish trap, the firebreak, the path to the Nelsons, and the road to town. “This was and is prairie country,” she reminded Rose, warning her not to confuse it with the hills and the gorge that they were so familiar with at Rocky Ridge. Aware that her memory was less than perfect on many details, she nevertheless was able to remember many particulars, even though she had been only seven years old when the family moved to Minnesota. Following the precedent set in the first book of elevating the girls’ ages, in this one Laura made them all a year older than they actually had been at the time.45
Laura's original manuscript had failed to mention the railroad tracks on the edge of town that she and her sisters had to cross on their way to school, and Rose asked about the omission. Her query jogged Laura's memory. She drew another map to show where the railroad had been and how it was situated in relation to the half dozen or so buildings that she remembered being in the town at the time. Rose was full of questions. She asked about how potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables could have survived in the ground after rabbits had eaten their tops, and Laura explained that Minnesota's soil differed from Missouri's, making it better able to preserve things that remained in the ground. She asked about the big “crab” that her mother had seen in the creek, not believing that a fresh-water crab was likely to be found there, but they decided to leave it in the book anyway. She asked about vanity cakes, about the rooms at the back of a store where a party was held, about the recipe for vinegar pie, about when school terms were held, about the desks and books and blackboards, about sidewalks and song lyrics, and about many other things.46
Laura dutifully answered all of Rose's questions as best she could, thanking her for making suggestions and for correcting her mistakes. “I know they are many,” she admitted. “I have written you the whys of the story as I wrote it. But you know your judgment is better than mine, so what you decide is the one that stands.” Many of the scenes were so vivid in her mind that she did not always consider that her readers might have a hard time visualizing what she was talking about without more elaborate description. Regarding the map of the town that she had drawn, she noted, “I see the pictures so plainly that I guess I failed to paint them as I should.” Not always, however, did Laura follow her daughter's advice. When Rose suggested that it would make more sense for Laura and Mary to have visited the town before walking there on their first day of school, her mother responded that she did not think they actually had seen the town before their first walk to school, so that was the way it stayed in the final draft.47
Laura was careful not only to get the details as accurate as possible but also to try to capture the right tone in describing relationships within the family. The pains she took to get the language—as well as the facts—right increases our confidence today that her descriptions of personality and personal interactions were essentially correct. While Laura's father never used language any stronger than “Gosh all hemlock” or “I'll be darned,” her mother would never have stooped to even such expressions. “Her language was rather precise and a great deal better language than I have ever used,” Laura admitted. She said that she and Grace had been more like their father in that respect; Mary and Carrie had been more like their mother. Referring to something that Rose had written about Ma saying that “she vowed she didn't believe those young ones were ever going to sleep,” Laura commented that her mother would never have called them “young ones.” She always referred to them as “children.” Nor, being a lady, would she ever have used the expression “I vow.”48
One technical problem had Laura stumped. During a blizzard when Pa was in town, Ma had to go out to the barn to take care of the animals, raising the question of how the scene should be written, since Rose always emphasized that everything should be described as Laura herself had observed it. But if Laura could not have gone out to the barn, she would have been in no position to describe the action inside. There was a problem, however, in that Laura would not have been tall enough to reach the clothesline that they had stretched from the house to the barn to prevent their wandering off in the storm, and Ma could not have held her hand because one of her hands would have been on the clothesline and the other would have been carrying the milk pail. “I don't know how to handle it,” Laura wrote Rose. “Seeing the inside of that stable and how Ma did the chores seems rather necessary to the interest of the whole thing. But How? I am beat!” In the end they decided to let Laura stay inside the house and imagine what Ma was doing, moment by moment, as she went out into the storm.49
While attempting to get all of the details straight, Laura and Rose were not above manipulating facts or even making things up in order to convey the proper impression to the reader or to keep the story moving. For example, in describing how the creek flowed past their dugout—foaming and roaring as it pushed around the bend—Laura told Rose, “I have an awful suspicion that we drank plain creek water, in the raw, without boiling it or whatever. But that would make the reader think we were dirty, which we were not. So I said a spring. There could have been a spring near where Pa watered the oxen or there could be one near the plank footbridge. As it is located in my imagination, you may put it where it is most convenient.”50
Rose spent about two months working on the manuscript. While mother and daughter were in correspondence about it, Laura added tidbits about happenings at Rocky Ridge. An electrical mishap had sparked a fire in the woods behind their garage by the barn. Luckily, they had been able to rouse the neighbors to help put it out. Almanzo had been in such a hurry to douse the flames that he ran out in just his shirt and shoes, without his pants or socks. More serious was some trouble that Al Turner had gotten into, which Laura advised Rose not just to forgive and forget. “If he gets off too easy,” she cautioned, “he might think he got away with that all right and you would help him out again and try something again.” Rose probably recognized in her mother's advice the same sort of strictness that she herself had been subject to while she was growing up. Laura seemed to be uncertain about the best way to treat the problem. After considering all of the ramifications, she concluded, “Oh Dam! I don't know what to do.”51
Even more difficult to deal with was the situation of Corinne Murray and her husband, who were living in the farmhouse while Rose was in Columbia. Jack Murray had been observed hauling water away in big cans in his truck to use in their laundry operation downtown. His apparent motive was to save on water bills. The situation was bothering Laura, who earlier had urged Rose to let the Murrays stay at the place. Now she advised getting rid of them and closing the house. Finally, as Rose recorded it in her journal four years later, Laura presented her with a simple choice: “come back at once to stay (and throw Corinne out) or get out myself. She added that she had ordered Bruce [the hired man] to kill my dog. (Which he did.)” In evicting Corinne, Rose softened the blow by giving her all of her possessions except for her books, and meanwhile gave the house back to her parents. They wasted little time in moving back into the house they had always preferred living in, and the rock house that Rose had built for them was left standing empty for the time being. Once separated from Rocky Ridge, Rose evinced no desire to return to it and did not come back to Mansfield to visit until Almanzo died in 1949.52
Rose finished revising and retyping the Plum Creek manuscript just before midnight on September 21 and sent the original to Laura the next day with detailed instructions about how to send it to George Bye. He would forward it to Ida Louise Raymond, who was waiting for it at Harper and Brothers. Rose informed her mother that she would hold on to the carbon copy until hearing that the original had arrived safely in New York, because to lose the manuscript would be ghastly. Previously, they had simply mailed packages from the Mansfield post office, keeping the carbon copy at home. Rose was being careful to maintain the illusion that these books were entirely her mother's work. She had worked steadily to get the manuscript finished, “not even stopping to sleep.” She thanked her mother for having sent along a picture of herself. “I am so glad to have your picture,” she wrote, “but I do not think it flatters you at all. Indeed you are much prettier than it.” She thought that the camera had made her look too old. “Your eyes are so lively and your expressions change so, and though if one stops to think of it your hair is white, still the effect is really of blonde hair, of light hair that contrasts so with your dark blue eyes and dark lashes, and is always so wavy and pretty.”53
When this third “Laura and Mary” book—and the fourth overall—appeared at the end of 1937, reviewers praised it in terms similar to the ones that they had used to describe the previous ones. The story was judged to be “fine,” “vigorous,” “honest,” and “magical.” Without reverting to sentimentality, it served up “a warm, glowing picture of steadfast family love and devotion,” Horn Book Magazine commented. The New York Times's reviewer welcomed a story in which the characters were allowed to speak for themselves. Rather than being told by the author what they were like, readers were allowed to observe directly their growth over time and to discover for themselves what kind of people they were. With four books now in circulation, Laura Ingalls Wilder had established a firm reputation for herself as a popular children's author, and her readers were begging for more.54