Lane, Rose Wilder

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LANE, Rose Wilder

Born 5 December 1886, De Smet, South Dakota; died 30 October 1968, Danbury, Connecticut

Daughter of Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder; married Gillette Lane, 1909

Unconventional from the first, Rose Wilder Lane left her parents' Mansfield, Missouri, home to work as a telegraph operator for Western Union. She married a land speculator whose ne'erdo-well behavior soon forced Lane to fend for herself as the first woman real estate agent in California. She was a reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin from 1914 to 1918. Written during this period, and indicative of her admiration for American heroes, are Henry Ford's Own Story (1917) and The Making of Herbert Hoover (1920), both panegyrics to men she considered archetypally American in their resourcefulness and individualism. After formally divorcing her husband, Lane worked for the American Red Cross during World War I, primarily in Russia, Turkey, and Albania. The Peaks of Shala (1923) is a travelogue of her adventures in Albania.

In the 1920s, her articles and short stories filled the most popular magazines and journals. In 1922, she received the second-place O. Henry best short story of the year award for "Innocence." "Yarbwoman" was included in O'Brien's The Best Short Stories of 1927, and her "Old Maid" was singled out for O. Henry honors again in 1933. Lane became one of the highest-paid writers in the U.S. "Innocence" and "Yarbwoman" are both set among poor whites of the South. Ironically, Lane's two prizewinning stories have an atypically eerie air. The dark forces are eventually shown to be those cruel and ignorant aspects of human nature coming from within man himself, especially as he is limited by moribund social structures.

Her Ozark novels, Hill Billy (1925) and Cindy (1928), were followed by her pioneer novels, Let the Hurricane Roar (1933, reprinted 1985) and Free Land (1938). In Let the Hurricane Roar two young pioneers struggle with the most intolerable conditions of the Dakota frontier, finding at last a sort of sad strength in themselves, even after their most cherished illusions are gone. The novel celebrates the capacity of the individual pioneer. Free Land takes a sardonic view of the governmental scheme to settle the frontier by the free grant of land. Lane's portrait of foolish expectations is satirical, but tempered by sympathy for the real sufferings of the naive settlers.

In Old Home Town (1935, reissued 1988), a collection of stories about women in a Midwestern town, Lane dissects smalltown life. Convention, intolerance, and gossip force the various women characters into unhappy marriages, into shame at being old maids of twenty-six, and even into suicide and murder. In the most overtly feminist story, "Immoral Woman," the lovely and talented Mrs. Sims is unjustly driven from the town by her clod of a husband and by the townspeople, who are held in thrall by the meanness of their accepted mores. She becomes a liberated woman and an internationally famous designer.

Give Me Liberty (1936) began Lane's overtly political career, and her belletristic efforts correspondingly diminished. In The Discovery of Freedom (1943), she maintains the progress of human civilization is towards "individualistic libertarianism" (with emphasis on private ownership) and individual freedom from coercion by collective society. Her adamant refusal to support New Deal programs such as social security and her opposition to taxation led her into increasingly conservative political company.

Lane was editor of the National Economic Council's Review of Books from 1945 to 1950, but after some of her more bitter political disputes, she retreated from the public arena, concerning herself with domestic arts, local politics, and behind-the-scenes encouragement of individualistic libertarianism. In 1965 Woman's Day magazine called Lane out of retirement to serve as their war correspondent in Vietnam. She died suddenly of a heart attack just before a projected trip abroad in 1968.

Lane was a woman of varied adventures and several careers, but the greatest proportion of her prolific literary production centered around intensely American life. She wrote in praise of the American capitalist and of the pioneer woman of the American West. In many ways her style is simple, but delightful in its factual detail and portraiture of life from a primarily feminine point of view.

Lane's thought and work resist traditional labels. Brilliant, adventurous, and self-sufficient, she was very opposed to the socialistic idealism historically connected with revolutionaries of her type in America. She saw governmental authority and smalltown propriety as abstractions that had no right to control the actual pragmatic course of real people's lives. This fierce elevation of the actual is the bedrock theme of her literary celebration of the quintessential American spirit.

Other Works:

Art Smith's Story (1915). Diverging Roads (1919). White Shadows in the South Seas (1919). The Dancers of Shamahka (1923). He Was a Man (1925). Woman's Day Book of American Needlework (1963). The Lady and the Tycoon (1973). Rose Wilder Lane: Her Story (1980). Travels with Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford: A Journal (1983). Islam and the Discovery of Freedom (special reprint, 1997). Young Pioneers (1998).

Bibliography:

Anderson, W., Laura's Rose: The Story of Rose Wilder Lane (1986). Doughty, J. A., "Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Cooperative Duo" (thesis,1994). Holtz, W. V., The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (1995). Laura Ingalls Wilder & Rose Wilder Lane, 1937-1939 (1992). MacBride, R, ed., The Lady and the Tycoon: Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane (1973). MacBride, R., Rose Wilder Lane: Her Story (1977). MacBride, R. L., Rose & Alva: Adapted from the Rose Years Books (2000). MacBride, R. L., Rose at Rocky Ridge: Adapted from The Rose Years Books (2000). Thompson, D., Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship: Letters, 1921-1960 (1991). Weaver, H., Mainspring; Based on the Discovery of Freedom (1947). Wilder, L. I., On the Way Home; The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894 (1990).