Rose Wilder Lane

Rose Wilder Lane was born on December 5, 1886, in De Smet, Dakota Territory, the only surviving child of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder. Exceptionally bright, she completed three years of Latin in one and, after high school, trained as a telegrapher and worked with Western Union across Missouri, Indiana, and California.In 1909, she married Gillette Lane. The marriage ended in divorce by 1915, and she never remarried. Her journalism career began at the San Francisco Bulletin, where she wrote serial biographies of Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, and Jack London, and later ghost-wrote memoirs for figures such as Chaplin and Ford.After moderate success as a novelist, her fortunes declined with the 1929 crash. She returned home and encouraged her mother to turn Pioneer Girl into a series of children's books. That effort became Little House in the Big Woods, the first of the beloved Little House series. Though she downplayed her role, Lane is widely credited with shaping and editing the books.In the 1940s and '50s, Lane became a prominent political writer and thinker. Her 1943 work The Discovery of Freedom helped lay the foundation for the modern American libertarian movement, alongside the writings of Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand. She mentored Roger Lea MacBride, who later inherited her literary estate.Lane traveled widely throughout her life, even reporting from Vietnam in 1965. She died peacefully in her sleep on October 30, 1968, at age 81, shortly before a planned three-year world tour.