Persevero Press
October 2013
On Sale: October 1, 2013
Featuring: Laura Ingalls Wilder; Rose Wilder Lane
ISBN: 0989203506 EAN: 9780989203500 Kindle: B00NWS4AL2 Trade Size / e-Book Add to Wish List
In 1928, Rose Wilder Laneโworld traveler, journalist, much- published magazine writerโreturned from an Albanian sojourn to her parentsโ Ozark farm. Almanzo Wilder was 71, Laura 61, and Rose felt obligated to stay and help. To make life easier, she built them a new home, while she and Helen Boylston transformed the farmhouse into a rural writing retreat and filled it with visiting New Yorkers. Rose sold magazine stories to pay the bills for both households, and despite the subterranean tension between mother and daughter, life seemed good.
Then came the Crash. Roseโs money vanished, the magazine market dried up, and the Depression darkened the nation. Thatโs when Laura wrote her autobiography, โPioneer Girl,โ the story of growing up in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, on the Kansas prairie, and by the shores of Silver Lake. The restโthe eight remarkable books that followedโis literary history.
But it isnโt the history we thought we knew. For the surprising truth is that Lauraโs stories were publishable only with Roseโs expert rewriting. Based on Roseโs unpublished diaries and Lauraโs letters, A Wilder Rose tells the true story of the decade-long, intensive, and often troubled collaboration that produced the Little House booksโ the collaboration that Rose and Laura deliberately hid from their agent, editors, reviewers, and readers.
Why did the two women conceal their writing partnership? What made them commit what amounts to one of the longest- running deceptions in American literature? And what happened in those years to change Rose from a left-leaning liberal to a passionate Libertarian?
In this impeccably researched novel and with a deep insight into the book-writing business gained from her own experience as an author and coauthor, Susan Wittig Albert follows the clues that take us straight to the heart of this fascinating literary mystery.
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