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