| Notes |
- She lived in De Smet, Dakota Territory between December 5, 1886 and 1890. When her parents were very ill with diptheria, she was sent to live with her maternal grandparents for several months. In the Summer 1889 she was "helping" her mother in the kitchen, when a fire started, destroying the family's home. She lived in Spring Valley, MN in 1890. With her parents, she lived with her paternal grandparents after the birth and death of her brother, the destruction of their home by fire, and several crop failures. She lived in Westville, FL between 1891 and 1892. She later wrote a fictional short story entitled "Innocence" in 1922, based on her family's stay in Westville. She lived in De Smet, SD between 1892 and July 17, 1894. The family lived in a rented house in town. Her parents worked and her maternal grandmother took care of her during the day. She began school in De Smet, and learned to read and write very quickly. She lived in Mansfield, MO after August 31, 1894. She was very intelligent and thought school was boring because the work was far too easy for her. Because of this, her mother consented to let her study on her own at home much of the time. She graduated in 1904 in Crowley, LA. The Mansfield school only went through the tenth grade, so she lived with her aunt Eliza Jane Wilder in 1903 and 1904 to complete high school. Between 1904 and 1907 she was a Telegraph Operator in Kansas City, MO. Western Union. Between 1907 and 1908 she was a Telegraph Operator in Mount Vernon, IN. Western Union. She lived in San Francisco, CA after 1908. She lived in Kansas City, MO after April 1909. Before 1910 she was a Writer in Kansas City, MO. Kansas City Post.
She lived in San Francisco, CA after 1910. She became involved in selling real estate as one of the first female real estate agents in California. Her career flourished, and slowly, she and her husband found less and less in common with each other. When World War I decreased land sales, she returned to writing. After 1915 she was a Feature reporter in San Francisco, CA. Wrote serial stories and columns for the San Francisco Bulletin. During the next three decades, she would write numerous short stories and articles for major magazines, including Sunset, The Ladies Home Journal, Harper's Monthly, Asia, Country Gentleman, and The Saturday Evening Post. After 1917 she was an Author in San Francisco, CA. 'Henry Ford's Own Story.' Wrote 'Diverging Roads,' a fictional novel based on her separation and eventual divorce. She wrote early biographies of Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Herbert Hoover and Jack London. During the 1920s and 1930s, which represented the peak of her professional writing career, her short stories and novels were often nominated for O. Henry Awards and other literary honors, she was frequently anthologized, and was regularly featured in leading publications such as Harper's, Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping and Ladies' Home Journal.
After 1919 she was an Author in Greenwich Village, NY. Ghost writer for Frederick O'Brien's 'White Shadows on the South Seas.' She also wrote 'The Making of Herbert Hoover' under her own name. After World War I, Rose became a reporter for the American Red Cross, and was assigned to write about the conditions in war-torn countries. During this time, she met two women who would become her closest friends, Dorothy Thompson and Helen "Troub" Boylston, who wrote the "Sue Barton" nurse series for girls. Her job took her throughout Europe, but of all the countries she visited, Albania quickly became her favorite. She wrote 'The Peaks of Shala' about Albanian life, and informally adopted Albanian boy Rexh Meta after he saved her life. Many years later, she provided money for Rexh to come to America and get a college education. She lived in Greenwich Village, NY after 1919. She lived at Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, MO after 1924. She wrote two of her most enjoyable novels, 'Cindy' and 'Hill Billy.' She lived in Albania before 1928. She and Helen Boylston returned to Albania; their journal of the trip was published as 'Travels With Zenobia.' The unstable situation in Albania forced her back to Missouri.
She lived at Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, MO after 1928. She and her friend Helen moved into Rocky Ridge Farmhouse, and she had a modern rock house built for her parents on another part of the farm. Felt financially stable at last, and she freely spent money on the new home for her parents, as well as making major updates on the farmhouse. She lost most of her money in the stock market crash of 1929, however, and returned to her pen to earn a living once again.
She lived in New York after 1938. She lived in Danbury, CT after 1939. Became heavily involved in politics, as she wrote about in The Discovery of Freedom. In 1943, she met Roger Lea MacBride, teenage son of one of her editors. Roger admired her and she taught the young boy much about her political beliefs over the years. Roger called her "Grandma" and later became her attorney and heir, as well as the Libertarian Party's 1976 candidate for President of the United States.
In 1965 she was a War Corespondant in Vietnam.
She died on October 30, 1968 in Danbury, CT. She was buried in November 1968 in Mansfield Cemetery, Mansfield, MO.
She was a Writer and Author. Many article and magazine serials, as well as many books, including Let the Hurricane Roar, Old Home Town, Faces at the Window, Home Over Saturday; and Free Land, a Story of Homesteading. She was English, Scotch, and French. Her mother Laura Wilder tells of her birth and early childhood in her book 'The First Four Years.' In an autobiographical piece for the Federal Writers Project, she described her varied experiences: "I have been office clerk, telegrapher, newspaper reporter, feature writer, advertising writer, farmland salesman. I have seen all the United States and something of Canada and the Caribbean; all of Europe except Spain; Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq as far east as Baghdad, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan." She traveled the United States extensively with her husband, and worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin. Her first novel, Diverging Roads, was serialized in Sunset Magazine and then published in book form in 1919. She also authored several biographies -- her first book was a life of Henry Ford -- including the first ever written about Herbert Hoover, in 1920. Her work researching that book led to a friendship with Hoover which lasted for over 40 years. The extensive travels to which she refers included stints as a reporter in San Francisco and as a Red Cross publicist in Washington, D.C., as well as several months in New York's Greenwich Village, where she became involved in radical socialist politics.
After the end of World War I, she was sent to the Balkans by the Red Cross to investigate conditions there; her reports were published in the Red Cross Bulletin. Crucially, she also stayed for a time in the newly formed Soviet Union, an experience that would shake and, ultimately, destroy her sympathy for communism. Finishing her work for the Red Cross in 1922, she toured Europe and the Middle East, with an interlude back at the family farm in Missouri in 1924-25 to write several stories about the Ozarks, including the successful Hill Billy.
She repeatedly visited Albania, where she witnessed a revolution and refused a proposal of marriage from Ahmet Zogu, the future King Zog I. Returning more permanently to the United States at decade's end, she became a prolific author of short stories, novels, and magazine articles, writing for such publications as Harper's, Ladies' Home Journal, and the Saturday Evening Post. During this time, she also began a long standing collaboration with her mother, whom she had encouraged to write children's stories about her childhood in the old West. How much she had to do with the writing of these stories, which would become the "Little House" series, is a matter of some dispute. It is generally agreed that she edited her mother's notes and diaries at length, and in his controversial biography of her, Ghost in the Little House William V. Holtz argues that her revisions were so extensive that she ought to be considered not merely editor but co-author of the Little House series. The conclusion can be made that Wilder's strengths as a compelling storyteller and Lane's considerable skills in dramatic pacing, literary structure and characterization contributed to an occasionally tense, but remarkable collaboration between two talented women. In fact, the collaboration seems to have benefited her career as much as her mother's - two of her most commercially successful novels, "Let the Hurricane Roar" and "Free Land" were written at the same time as the "Little House" series, and basically retell Ingalls and Wilder family stories, but in an adult format.
She publicly disavowed her youthful socialism in a long 1936 article in the Saturday Evening Post titled "Credo," which was later reprinted as the pamphlet Give Me Liberty. She related her disillusionment -- and that of her Russian friends -- with the new Soviet regime, as well as anecdotes about the bureaucratic red tape she encountered in Parisian markets, and the behavior of police in Budapest sent to enforce mandatory work rules. Economic central planning, her experiences and travels had taught her, was incompatible with both prosperity and individual liberty. In her autobiographical essay for the FWP, she said this about her change of heart: "In 1917 I became a convinced, though not practicing communist. In Russia, for some reason, I wasn't and I said so, but my understanding of Bolshevism made everything pleasant when the Cheka arrested me a few times. I am now a fundamentalist American; give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit. Also I will tell you why the relative freedom of human spirit is better -- and more productive, even in material ways -- than the communist, Fascist, or any other rigidity organized for material ends." Her writing reflected her growing concern with government encroachment on individual liberties. Her 1938 pioneer novel Free Land, the royalties from which financed her purchase of a home in Connecticut, would be her last published fiction.
After about 1940, she turned away from fiction writing and became one of the more influential American libertarians of the middle 20th century. She vehemently opposed the New Deal, creeping socialism and taxation, claiming she ceased writing highly-paid commercial fiction in order to avoid paying income taxes. A staunch opponent of communism after seeing it in practice in the Soviet Union, she was the author of The Discovery of Freedom (1943), and tirelessly promoted and wrote about individual freedom, liberty and its impact on mankind. In 1945, she began writing for the National Economic Council's Review of Books. A correspondence with Ayn Rand that lasted several years began when Rand sent her a letter of thanks for her favorable review of The Fountainhead in that publication. She was not merely a theorist, but an activist as well. In 1945-46, she led a campaign against the introduction of zoning, which she saw as a violation of individual property rights, in her town. She also grew her own food to avoid wartime rationing, and later quit her editorial job with the National Economic Council so as not to pay Social Security taxes. Her prescience regarding the instability of that system was astonishing: throughout the 1950s she would describe it as unstable and a "Ponzi fraud." She told friends that it would be immoral of her to take part in a system that would predictably collapse so catastrophically, as the example of Weimar Germany convinced her that it would. In 1958, a man named Robert Le Fevre who had been strongly influenced by her 'The Discovery of Freedom' asked her to come visit his "Freedom School," which he had founded to promote the individualist principles he said she had taught him. She would become a regular lecturer there for several years thereafter.
During the early 1960s, she contributed book reviews to the influential William Volker Fund. At the age of 78, she worked as a war correspondent in South Vietnam for Woman's Day. When she died in her sleep on October 30, 1968, just as she was about to depart on a three-year world tour. HarperCollins Publishers have released a spin-off series to the "Little House" books based on Rose's childhood in Missouri. Seven books have been published so far: Little House on Rocky Ridge, Little Farm in the Ozarks, In the Land of the Big Red Apple, On the Other Side of the Hill, Little Town in the Ozarks, New Dawn on Rocky Ridge, and On the Banks of the Bayou.
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1886 - 1968 (81 years)
