Wilder - 2. Heroine with a Thousand Faces

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

How do you convey how much you loved the things you loved as a child? For lots of people, that thing is the Little House books. For better or worse, the books have shaped children’s lives and influenced how we understand American history. But to truly understand what we love and why we love it, we have to know where it comes from. The books didn’t just spring fully formed from Laura’s mind. There were many people, places, and institutions responsible for getting them published. This week, host Glynnis MacNicol takes us from Mansfield, Missouri to the halls of New York publishing houses to explain how the Little House books got written in the first place and shaped into the books we continue to return to today.   Go deeper: Visit Laura’s home in Mansfield The Pioneer Girl ProjectDear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom Follow us for behind the scenes content! @WilderPodcast on TikTok@Wilder_Podcast on InstagramSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How do you convey how much you loved the things you loved as a child? Is it even possible? I really liked Little House on the Prairie because it's cool to read about things that you've never done before. I read the books when I was a kid and I just loved them. I found Little Town on the Prairie and I was hooked. We know we never loved anything the way we did when we were seven or eight. Follow my boys about an eight-year-old boy like me who grew up on a farm in New York.

Yeah, they used to live in this little hill sort of thingy. I like that little house. But is there a language to describe how deep this kind of love goes? How formative it is? I went through a phase where I wanted to be a pioneer. You see their relationship blossom and see them go through happy times and struggle together. It's like you're actually there when you're reading the book. It's almost like the things we love work their way into our DNA and then seem to reappear at key moments in our lives.

The pandemic had, and I said, I haven't read those things in years. And I thought, well, I'm on the head at home, everything I was doing was canceled. I need to do something interesting. And I thought, well, go back, I have time. I'll go read the little housebooks. Some of you might recognize that voice.

That's Allison Arngrim, the actress who played Laura's iconic nemesis, Nellie Olson, on the hit television show Little House on the Prairie. During lockdown, Alison started reading the Little House books out loud on Facebook, for anyone who wanted to tune in. So I got on Facebook and say, okay guys, the woman wrote nine books and I will read them all starting with Book 1.

Can you help me up? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Once upon a time, 60 years ago, a little girl lived in the big, I read the little housebooks every freaking day. I read all nine books. A lot of people said it really got them through the pandemic. I got a commemorative thing from my local senator for raising morale during the pandemic,

exploring the works of law, Ingalls Wilder, increasing literacy rate, et cetera, et cetera. A thing, a proclamation. But why were all these people tuning in to be read to? If you were bored, drink lockdown, there were plenty of options. Was it the thrill of being read to you by Nelly? Was it the tale of the Ingalls self-sufficiency, the co-siness of the family,

the sense of safety from the outside world? Maybe it was all of the above. Allison has a theory of her own. The problems of the Ingles are universal. The majority of people on earth don't actually have very much money. And the Ingles live in like a two-room house with a whole bunch of kids,

and worry if they're gonna make it through the week. That's really how probably 80-90% of humans on the planet are living in a tiny place with a lot of children wondering if they'll have enough to eat. The Little House on the Prairie series has remained popular since they were first published in the 1930s at the height of the Great Depression, like seriously popular. They have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. Their average rating on goodreads is 4.2, hundreds of thousands of readers have reviewed them.

Maybe it's more interesting to consider the books in the context of what Alson mentioned. It's not just that they are popular, it's when they are extra popular. The series seems to peak at key moments. The clothes of an era. The great big spree, the jazz egg, is all... It first emerged in the Great Depression.

It researched, along with the television show, during the post-Vietnam economic hardship of the 1970s. People will want to work, but can't find jobs, or part of today's other... And then it made a return during the global pandemic. New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut, all ordering non-essential employees to stay home. Readers seemed to turn to Laura's books

and greater numbers when times are hard. This is probably not a coincidence. The time period Laura was writing about, the 1870s, was a decade of severe economic hardship in America. It was essentially the country's first great depression. During her childhood, Laura survived debilitating hunger, poverty, child labor, disease, and extreme environmental events. And then, after all that, just when she should have been

at least slowing down, she did the opposite. At age 63, 63, she took pen to paper and wrote down her story. The result? Or a fundamentally changed children's books. And also, how we understand a part of American history. How did she do this? Who helped? How is this woman, after so much suffering, able to find the magical details

in all that deprivation, so that nearly a century later, in other times of hardship, so many of us returned to her. I'm going to smick Nickel, and this is Wilder. ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ‿ʻ ʻ� We're going to start with the first one. Read the top, what's that say? Little house in the big woods. That's our producer, Joe, reading the first little house book, little house in the big woods, to her then four-year-old son, Charlie, for the very first time. Should we get started? So as far as the little girl could see,

there was only the one little house where she lived with her father and mother, her sister Mary and baby sister Carrie. The barrels of salted fish were in the pantry, and yellow cheeses were stacked on the pantry shelves. And one... Longer. You know I'm... He's making me so hungry.

He's making me so hungry. So, Joe had a Charlie like the book. He loved it. He found it completely magical. He asked when we're going to move to a little house in the big woods and survive on bear and deer and play with pigs blotters. Yeah, I think I can hear it in Charlie's voice.

And I think it's sort of the tone of his voice and his response captures the challenge of talking about the actual little house books. They are magical and they're so engrossing and they're perfectly formed. And like, how do you explain that to someone who hasn't read them? So I feel like if you're a person who hasn't read these books, you're just going to have to take my word for it. Because I imagine there's something in everyone's life, like there's something in your life that you have felt this strongly about as a kid.

So even if you don't understand the books, you understand the feeling. Okay, all right, that's great. But I still think you have to give our listeners just a little sense of the basic plot points. Are we on the moon? Are there aliens involved? When and where are we in space?

What exactly happens in this book? Because unlike you, not everybody knows. I'm gonna do my best. Okay, the Little House in the Perry Book Series is nine books long. So we tried so many times to sum up this book series and none of it worked until I made a voice memo for Joe from my bathtub and we really nailed it. And here it is.

The books open, Laura, four years old, living in the big woods of Wisconsin with her family and she loves very much and and it's very cozy. And there's a lot of animal slaughtering and food. And then Pa takes the family to what is then called Indian territory, what is now Kansas, and they legally squat there and build a house. And they have a lot of interactions with Native Americans. And then we were told the government asked them to leave because they shouldn't be there

and they're very angry about it. And Pa takes them to Minnesota, Walnut Grove, Minnesota, where they live in a dugout. And Laura meets her arch-nemesis, Milly Olson. And then Pa builds some really beautiful house based on the bumper crop he's expecting to get. And they move in. And then the bumper crop gets eaten expecting to get. And they move in and then the bumper crop gets eaten by a plague of grasshoppers

for like four years in a row. And then Paul most eyes on a snowbank and starts to death, but he doesn't. And then Mary, Laura's older sister, goes blind and Paul goes to the Dakota territories to work on the railroad and the family follows and they help build this town of Desmond, South Dakota and they survive a historically long and bad winter

that's in the history books. The whole town almost starves to death, but they don't and then Laura Sarshanema-Sasnelli arrives again, Laura goes to school, she meets her future husband Al-Manzo, they wanna send Mary off to college for the blind and so Laura goes to school, she meets her future husband, Almanzo. They want to send Mary off to college for the blind. So Laura goes to work as a school teacher at the age of 15 in a very remote place. The family she's living with, the wife is so angry to be there that she in the middle

of the night, she tries to stab her husband to death. Laura finishes her job, comes home with the money, comes back to her family, and then Almanzo continues to court her, and then Almanzo continues to court her, and then she and Almanzo get married. And the very last book, which was published after Laura died, is about the first four years of their marriage. There you go, that's the plot point overview. Wow.

And it sounds crazy when I say it. But the thing to know is that all of these books involve these incredible tactile descriptions of food and clothing, she's always talking about how prettily Ma has organized the house. Laura's like the original lifestyle blogger and everything in their home is cheerful and snug, but there's also this dark undercurrent of danger that runs through everything, which I loved as a kid. But most importantly, I think, is that parts of these books are deeply problematic. And particularly the third book, Little House on the Prairie, when they're illegally squatting on Osage land,

there are quite a few violent racist descriptions of Native Americans. This is what gets the most attention when people are critical of the books. But I think it's important to note that they're not the only problematic issues. There are plenty of examples like in the seventh book, Little Town on the Prairie, there's an entire chapter about a minstrel show

that pop participates in where he's dressed in blackface. At the same time, these books are about a complicated girl. She gets angry, she gets jealous, she has adventures, and she has a lot of agency. She also loves her family so much. And the books hold all of this. So if you had to say in one line or less, what the thing that you loved the most about the books was, what would it be? That Laura is a real person and the things she wrote about happened to her. Because there's a lot of stories about girls out there, but what you're saying is that none of those were real people and you related to the fact that she was a

real person who actually lived these adventures. Yeah. That's the key here, right? She's real, but she also made you feel like you were in it with her, that you were walking in her shoes. But is that story the truth, the actual truth? No. They're shelved in the fiction section for a reason. So what does it mean that these stories were fictionalized, that they ended up in the fiction section for a reason. So what does it mean that these stories were fictionalized, that they ended up in the fiction section? I think what it really means is that reading these books as a kid felt like they sort of emerged perfectly formed directly from Laura's head.

And the truth was they didn't, obviously. But, you know, even more than that, these books had a long road to publication. They were very intentionally crafted by a variety of people. I sort of think of it like the children's literature version of taking a cotton swab to the inside of your cheek. And then you send it off to ancestry.com

to find out who all your ancestors are. So when I say that I love these books so wholeheartedly as a child, that I feel like you could take my DNA and put under a microscope and you'd find like braids there and probably like some wolves, then I want to understand what else is in this DNA? Or like who else is here? If these books were so formative to me and to a lot of people, then what is forming us? Or perhaps the better question is who? And that's where we're going to go after the break. We are literally going to go on the map to where the books actually begin and find out who is behind them.

Do I get off her? City limit man's field. I'm in a place called Mansfield, Missouri, with our producer Emily. Mansfield might not mean anything to you until I tell you that Mansfield, Missouri, is in the Ozarks, an hour west of Springfield, Missouri.

All I knew as a kid is that it was on a different page of my parents' atlas and that Laura lived there. It always felt mysterious. Mansfield, Missouri, was on the back cover of every single Laura Ingalls book I owned. So just even driving into it still I feel like a little kid like driving into a map that I was so obsessed with. Man's Field isn't in the little house books,

but it is the site of their creation story. Its main attraction is Rocky Ridge Farm, a picturesque white farmhouse perched on a hill. This is where Laura, her husband Almanzo, the site of their creation story. Its main attraction is Rocky Ridge Farm, a picture-esque white farmhouse perched on a hill. This is where Laura, her husband, Almanzo, and their young daughter Rose settled in 1894. Rocky Ridge's Laura's house, Laura designed every inch of it to her specifications right down to the height of the kitchen counters because she was so tiny. She also designed her own writer's nook looking out on the lawns and then Omanzo built it off for her. I mean this set up is fantastic. Yeah.

To be honest, as a writer, this is amazing. Right? I mean, there's anyone it's amazing, but Man Place converted the small radio chest into the tall window to a storage chest when it stopped working on the opposite walls or was tasked where many of the little house books were written. This is the place where the sausage got made. Or in Laura's case, this is the place where she described how

sausages got made in a way that made children want to make sausages. Her blue shawl was kept handy on the back of the chair to warm her shoulders. The daybed couch served as a handy place to sleep in the early morning hours after she had written through her most of the night. Oh, she's a nighttime writer. The daybed isn served as a handy place to sleep in the early morning hours after she had written through most of the night. Oh, she's a night time writer. The daybed isn't here. Wow.

Rocky Ridge is a place you go to encounter Laura the writer, not the children's book character, but the woman who wrote the books. The Rocky Ridge Museum lives many of the most well-known artifacts from Laura's books. The piece of lace Ida gives her before her wedding. The glass plate Laura saves from their burning house in the first four years It also holds the most important artifact That's intense It was such a it's like a character in the book. I don't like it is. We don't just have pause fiddle

Once a year they take it out and they play it. Laura's daughter Rose wrote that before they left South Dakota, Pa told Laura he was leaving the fiddle to her. He said, Laura, you've always stood by us. When the time comes, I want you to have the fiddle. It's very intense of him standing in front of a window that she wrote the books, but also the way she, the idea that that's what is seen through the windows now,

is like this, but not just the legacy of her books. It's like the legacy of the thing she loved the most, which is her father and the music. So extraordinary. Laura's entry into writing began when Rose, already a successful full-time journalist, encouraged her mother to try her hand at it. And the truth was Laura needed to bring in more money. The farm was barely making ends meet. Starting in 1911, when Laura was in her mid-40s, all the way through 1924, she had a farm column in the Missouri Ruralist under the byline Mrs. A.J. Wilder. Laura wrote pieces titled, Economy and Egg Production, and, good times on the farm, it's

easy to have fun if you plan for it. Her writing was practical and geared towards other farm wives like herself. And yet, even then, amidst all the egg advice, Laura was envisioning more. I think she always had a sense of, you know, wanting to be a writer. That's Caroline Fraser, author of Prairie Fires, the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. I mean, I think it was very kind of a vague notion, but I think those feelings were there.

Laura Ingalls Wilder was a woman who'd been harboring some big dreams for a long time. In 1915 at age 48, Laura made a cross-country trip to visit her daughter Rose, traveling all the way to San Francisco by herself. During the lengthy visit, Rose encouraged her mother to pitch some stories about her travels as a way to make money. And one of her letters home to Almanzo Laura tells him, I intend to try to do some writing that will count. Of course, all aspiring writers want to do writing that will count, and pay. Not all aspiring writers have a daughter who's one of the most successful freelance writers in the country.

America loves the story of someone pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but as we all know, behind most success stories is a case of someone who knew someone, who knew someone. And in Laura's case, that's someone is Rose, and Rose knew everyone. Perhaps the best description for Rose is that she was Laura's fixer. But back to Laura, and her desire to do writing that will count. For Laura, what counted most was her family and her childhood memories of them. Caroline Fraser thinks it goes all the way back to when Laura had to leave her family and her childhood memories of them. Caroline Fraser thinks it goes all the way back to when Laura had to leave her family behind and to smet South Dakota.

While I was racking the timeline, I could see clearly that when she and El Manzo come to the point where they have to give up in South Dakota, that leapt out to me as a profound emotional moment in her life. It could be because leaving then is not what it is now. And so it really represented a wrenching kind of loss of her former life and of her relationships. That, I think, is the primary motivation behind her wanting to write about her life. Decades passed between Laura leaving her family and writing about them. Laura first sat down to write about her childhood following the death of her older sister Mary

in 1928. Laura was 61. Mary's death wasn't the first family loss. Laura's ma, Caroline Ingalls, had died a few years earlier. Pa had been dead since 1902, but there was something about Mary. When Laura was 12, Mary had gone blind, and Pa had tasked Laura with being Mary's eyes. Laura spent the rest of her childhood literally describing everything she saw to her sister. Something about losing Mary, for whom she had been the eyes for so many years. A responsibility that turned her into the descriptive genius she eventually became, prompted Laura to start writing about her youth.

She wanted to preserve her father's stories, the one she and Mary had grown up with. At least in the beginning, she was inspired by those stories and wanting to keep those stories alive because she felt they were extraordinary. That's Pamela Smith Hill, author of Laura Ingalls Wilder, A Writers Life. This is something a lot of Wilder scholars agree on. By the time Laura had lost her paw and her ma and her older sister Mary, she felt an overwhelming urge to preserve their family history. Laura Ingalls Wilder said that she felt that her paw's stories were too good to be altogether lost.

So Mary dies. And Laura decides she's going to write a memoir. At age 63, she sits down at her custom-built desk and tries to describe their life for everyone who couldn't be there to see it. Laura called the resulting manuscript Pioneer Girl. And this is key. She was writing it for grownups. The idea was that she would wider autobiography

and that Lane would try to market it to magazines as a serial. Saturday evening post, good housekeeping, McCalls, one of those major magazines of the time period. That's Nancy Tisted Coppall, the director and editor-in-chief of the Pioneer Girl Project, a research and publishing initiative of the South Dakota Historical Society. So she was writing for adults, but the subject matter was her own use, her life from the time she was two years old to the time she was 18 years old. Pioneer Girl is heavy on description, but light on structure. Laura wrote it in pencil,

on the popular big chief Indian tablets you could buy at the drugstore. There are no chapters, or even breaks. It is written in first person. Little House readers will recognize many of the scenes that eventually made it into the series. For instance, the story of the wolf circling the house in Indian territory is included in the opening pages of Pioneer Girl. It was one of Laura's first memories.

So Laura finishes her life's work so far and gives it to Rose who takes it out to her publishing contacts. But here's the thing, no one wants it. Here's Pamela Smith-Hill again. The Saturday evening post had Pioneer Girl and passed on it. And that was that Pioneer Girl languished in obscurity for eight decades, until Nancy Tystead Koopel and Pamela Smith Hill published the annotated version in 2014. In a letter back to her mother Rose said that

the Saturday new post saw a lot to admire and pine her girl, a lot it was well done, but they were more interested in a fictional version of a pine your story rather than in a fictional version of a pioneer story, rather than in a memoir or an autobiography. A fictional version. Okay, please travel back in time with me once again, this time to the local branch of the Kitchener Waterloo

Library. Walk with me down the W.O. of the Fiction section and observe eight-year-old me furiously pulling the little housebooks off the shelves so I could reshelve them in the non-fiction section where they belonged. I failed project because the Dewey Decimal System. But that rage was real, and that rage

is what runs through the devotion the books inspire. Devotion, obsession, cult following, you can pick your own fandom level. But the through line is the knowledge that the little house books are based on real life. And also, they are fiction. But what did it mean to fictionalize them? And who was responsible for doing it? And once it was done, how did it fundamentally change children's literature? After the break, we're going to take you into the halls of the children's publishing

world and discover what I've come to believe is the single most important decision made about the Little House books. So Laura's written her life story. She sent it out to everyone and no one wants it. This is not actually an unusual experience in publishing. It's certainly something I've experienced and something our producer Joe has experienced, where you're told they like parts of what you've done, but you have to turn it into something they can make money off of whether that's something you want to write or not. It amazes me that any books get published ever to be honest.

The process of getting a book published is one of the most gonzo circuses that I have ever gone through in my professional career. And that was true in Laura's day as much as it is now. Absolutely, I think so. And what I find amazing about this story is that Laura submitted the manuscript, it got rejected by everyone. And she still got a redo.

She still got a redo because Rose, her daughter, had this access in the publishing world, which is a very rare thing. Yeah, I mean, Rose was at the time one of the most successful freelance writers in the country. She was very connected and Newark publishing, like super connected. And she facilitated getting Laura's manuscripts to like two of the most iconic children's book editors at the time. So this story of how the Little House series came to be feels like there were so many outside forces

that ultimately made this work for her. Right, because Rose didn't just know everyone, I think the piece of the puzzle that's important here is like she knew how it all worked. She knew what to submit and who to submit it to. She knew how to pitch, which you and I both know is like the secret to the sauce. It's knowing how to pitch.

How to pitch, who to pitch to and what to pitch. And when to pitch? Yeah, and when to pitch. Yeah, Rose was the trifecta. So what did Laura have to turn these books into in order to actually get them sold? Well, the truth is Rose took matters into her own hands. The story of Little House's trip to bookshelves begins sometime in 1930 after Pioneer Girl

was turned down by everyone. Rose, Laura's daughter, who was also desperate for money now thanks to some bad investments, decides to revise Pioneer Girl as a very young children's story called, when Grandma was a little girl. It's unclear whether Laura even knew Rose did this. We do know that Rose considered children's book publishing beneath her own byline and had initially discouraged her mother from writing for kids.

Rose, I think, saw the book as something that perhaps she could take to her friend in school were children and illustrators and perhaps they might be interested in illustrating it as children's book. Rose showed her kids revision, still under Laura's byline, to a successful couple she knew

who illustrated children's books. And they sent it to the newly established children's department at Kanoff. Keep in mind, the children's book industry was in its infancy. The Kanoff editor read this draft and then requested a longer version. But one that was aimed at a slightly older audience. Think ages 7 to 9.

Laura immediately got to work. The result? Little house in the big woods. The first book in the series. We have no correspondence between Rose and Laura during this time. Little House in the Big Woods, the first book in the series. We have no correspondence between Rose and Laura during this time, but we do know that Kanoff eventually got a new manuscript aimed at older readers, and they loved it. Hollywood ending, right?

Not so much. Remember, this is the early 1930s. Shortly after Kanooff gets this manuscript, the depression really hits, and her brand new children's department is shut down due to budget cuts. But all is not lost. Over at Harper's and Brothers, a woman named Virginia Kirkus,

she'd go on to found the Kirkus review, heard a rumor that there was a new children's book manuscript floating around. Virginia Kirkus was the children's editor at Harper & Brothers, and she heard about this manuscript by an elderly lady about her frontier childhood, and she agreed to look at it. That's Bill Anderson. He's written a number of books on Laura. For Virginia Kirkus, receiving the Little House in the Big Woods manuscript was love at first read.

She was so enthralled she missed her train stop on the way home that weekend. And almost instantaneously over a weekend, she decided that she was going to publish Little House in the Big Woods. and she made an interesting observation. She said, this is a book that no depression can stop. In a letter, Kirk is later called Little House in the Big Woods, the highlight of her career. One felt that one was listening, she said, not reading.

Unbeknownst either or Rose in that moment, they had landed in the exact right place at the exact right time. Big Woods is an instantaneous hit. Little House and the Big Woods receives the first of five Newberry Award honors that Laura would get in her lifetime. Virginia Kirkus immediately asks for more. And Laura promptly sits down to write what she views as the companion piece to Little House in the Big Woods,

an account of Al Manzo's much less precarious childhood in Northern New York State. This is Farmer Boy. But readers want more, and Laura gives it to them. Next comes Little House on the Prairie in 1935, and then over the following eight years, five more books. Letters pour in. Children are obsessed.

So Laura, now nearing 80, is an internationally renowned author. She has fans writing to her from all over the world. Her books by any metric are huge success. And yet, I'm not actually convinced we'd still be talking about the books the way we do if it wasn't for one key decision. When I tell you what that is, it's going to seem so obvious. It was actually shocking to me when I first considered the impact. Here's Bill Anderson again. By the time they were complete to 1943,

the brilliant editor, Ursula Nordstrom, at Harper and Brothers, already could foresee that she had shepherded most of the little house books through publication and Harper and Brothers had a classic set of books on their hands. Even if you don't know Ursula Nordstrom, you know her. And not just because her family is behind

Nordstrom's department stores, she's a legend in children's publishing. In addition to Laura, she published EB White's Charlotte's web and Stuart Little among many others. Nordstrom started out as Virginia Kirkus' assistant around the time Laura turned in her fourth book on the banks of plum creek. She also fell in love with Laura at first read.

The tone of voice that Ursula Nordstrom always used in regard to Laura Ingalls' wilder was almost deification. She just simply adored working with the wilder books and she made the statement that the model for a juvenile novel should be the book on the bank's sublime creek. She's said to the fledgling authors, read the wild books, and you'll see what children's literature should be. In 1947, four years after the last book had been published, Ursula decided to re-issue the entire series as a box set. The original books have been illustrated

by a woman named Helen Sewell. Sewell's illustrations look a bit like woodcuts, straight lines, sharp edges, a little cold compared to Wilder's warm family stories and Laura's adventurous spirit. Nordstrom wanted a new look for the new set and hired a man named Garth Williams to illustrate all eight books. At the time, Williams was best known for his work on eb-white Stuart Little.

Garth told me himself, the first editions were decorated. I illustrated them. Bill Anderson knew Garth Williams, and over the years spoke with him many times about his work on the Little House books. As he tells it, despite William's success with Stuart Little and eventually Charlotte's web,

when Nordstrom asked him to illustrate Laura's books, he wasn't sure he was up to the task. His response was, I haven't been much west of the Hudson River, I don't know what the west looks like, so she sent him to find out. She sent him out to visit Rose Wilder Lane first, who was living in Danbury, Connecticut, and Garth told me that Rose said,

you must go and visit my parents. They're alive and well and very active, and they can tell you everything that you want to know and guide you to all the sites of their former homes and show you our family photographs. So that's how he happened to drive up to the Wilder Farm, Rocky Ridge, near Mansfield, Missouri, and spend part of a day with the wilders.

And he told me later on, I stood there just transfixed that there I was with the real Laura and Al Mansel. And he was very favorably impressed with him. It was after this meeting, Liam set out to replicate Laura's journey. He drove across the prairie into the woods, got caught in Midwest snowstorms. He walked down to Smed's main street.

It was actually Williams who found the location of the dugout near Plum Creek. He saw everything himself. He walked in Laura's shoes. And this is probably the reason his illustrations feel so true to what you're reading. I've hard-preded just continued the old stool illustrations. I just think that they would have faded away. But Garth's work really propelled them. And Mrs. Wilder's royalties hugely improved after the Gart Williams books came out.

She was a comparatively wealthy little old lady in her later years, and the last few years were greatly enhanced by the Gart Williams Illustrated editions. Today, these illustrations are treated like works of art as they should be. In 2011, they actually went to auction. When we went to dismiss this summer, the Laura Ingalls-Walter Memorial Society showed us their entire collection. They had an entire binder full. So, is there an agent? The original.

All right, I know exactly the part of the most that's from, too. This is when they were in a little house on the party when they'd been in Kansas. Ma had just set the little Chinathe Shepherd's up on the mantle, because wherever they went, didn't feel like home until the little Chinathe Shepherd's was at home on her shelf. Pa had built that chimney. Diane and Cheryl, two of the society senior staff members, were kind enough to take Emily and me behind the scenes into the society's vault where we went through all of Garth Williams illustrations, one by one. Probably we have the most extensive collection of Garth Williams illustrations.

These illustrations didn't come at a small price, which is perhaps not a surprise when you consider how devoted Laura Ingalls following is. We had to come up with donation money to get that. They were selling them and through an auction. And what were the averaging in price? Well, the first one, the very first, very first one from Little House on the Prairie of them in the Covered wagon, went for $22,000. And Diana and I were like, oh, we don't get to get any. And then by the end of that auction, they were going down and

down and down. We got one, and they only boredomly told us we could buy one and I bought two. Why? It's intense to put a number on the devotion Laura Ingalls Wilder inspires. It's difficult to quantify her impact, but her impact was enormous. And one of the reasons for that is these were not like the books children were used to reading. There's substance to the little house books, and there's this kind of wonderful gloss that

all children's book writers bring to their work, but there's also a sense of subversion underneath it packs, and sometimes you don't get that subverted message until you're in adults. That substance is what has carried the little housebooks through nearly a century of reading. Laura is ingrained in how we understand children's literature. There are so many things that she pioneered. She was a pioneer in children's literature and writing historical fiction with a very kind of hard, realistic edge to it. She pioneered writing for young adults. She gave us one of our most memorable disabled characters. She wrote a character in Longest Wilder

who is unconventional and timeless. Now that you know all of the hands that shaped the little house books, all of the forces that turn them into what they are, how has that changed, how you view the series, and how you view Laura? Yeah, I think we talked about earlier is it's that as a child, I thought these books just emerged perfectly formed from Laura's head.

And so, even though I've written a book and I understand the process required to do so, it's still in understanding all the people that were involved in creating a little house series. It feels a little bit like discovering you have a family that you never knew about. Secret family? A secret family you didn't know about. And at the same time, it makes me respect her more in a way because you're like this required an enormous amount of work and determination and like collaboration that I don't think was always easy.

It really did take a village to craft these classics. I think the process of getting from where she started to where the books ended up is kind of beautiful. I also think Laura was very complicated. And the fact that her difficult complicated nature as represented on the page is what stands out. And we now know how many people were involved in creating that story and the Laura on the page, then speaking about

a secret family you didn't know about and complicated women. When we talk about how these books got made, it's impossible to do so without talking about Rose. Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's daughter. Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's only daughter. I think there's the argument to be made that in this cast of people who created the books, she was the most influential and the most complicated. Rose Wilder Lane She hung out with the Lost Generation in Paris. She was a foreign correspondent in Albania.

She wrote biographies of Herbert Hoover, Charlie Chaplin, and Jack London, and was sued by all of their widows for misinformation. Some people think she found it the libertarian party. It's impossible to talk about Laura without talking about Rose, and it's impossible to talk about the little housebooks without acknowledging Rose's input. And that's what we're going to do next week. If you think you knew everything there was to know about Little House, hang on to your bonnets. Here comes Rose. Rose. Wilder is written and hosted by me, Glonismic Nickel.

Our story editors are Joe Piazza and Emily Maranoff. Our senior producer is Emily Maranoff. Our producers are Mary Dew and Shino Ozaki. Our associate producer is Lauren Philip, production help from Jessica Crinechich. Sound is on in mixing by Amanda Rose Smith. Our theme and additional music was composed by Lies McCoy. We are executive produced by Joe Piazza, Nikki Tor, Allie Perry, and me.

Special thanks to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri. Thanks to Charlie Astor and all the other kids, actual and young at heart, who told us why they loved the Loreingles books so much. Thank you to CDM Studios. Please see our show notes if you want to know more about the people we interviewed, the places we visited,

the books we mentioned. You can also find our contact info there if you want to write to us with your own thoughts and questions. Follow us on Instagram at Wilder underscore podcast and on TikTok at Wilder podcast, where you can see behind-the-scenes footage from all our travels. Thank you for listening.

We'll see you next week.