#3: Publishing Little House in the Big Woods - Part 1 (Laura Ingalls Wilder & Rose Wilder Lane)
How in the world does a debut author in her sixties write a bestseller that changes the publishing industry?
Speaker 1:And could you make every story more interesting by adding a family of serial killers?
Speaker 1:Stick around to find out.
Speaker 1:Hello, listeners. My name is Will Jauquet, and welcome to I'll Probably Delete This, where I get to learn about book publishing and podcasting by telling you stories from successful authors and other notable people from the history of the publishing industry.
Speaker 1:You may know that Laura Ingalls Wilder began writing the Little House series of books after she turned 60. This fact always struck me as strange and kind of impressive. She didn't publish any books before the Little House series. They are the only books she writes, and they're really well written and really engaging. They sell well from the beginning and only grow in popularity over time.
Speaker 1:Why did she start so late in life on these books? How did she get her first book deal after the age of 60? And what was it about her that she was able to write successful books in her sixties without having had a bunch of prior publishing experience? In this episode, we are going to focus on a partial answer to just one of those questions, how she got her first book deal. And we will divide the answer into two parts.
Speaker 1:This episode will cover some of her motivation to start writing and her experience submitting her memoir. And yes, I'll explain the serial killer reference. The next episode will close the loop on answering our question of how Laura Ingalls Wilder finally got the publishing contract and her first book published.
Speaker 1:In future episodes, we will cover more stories from other successful storytellers and authors. Join me now as we learn more about the publishing industry through telling part of Laura Ingalls Wilder's story.
Speaker 1:One problem with taking up any part of Laura 's story is that so much has been written about her. There are really no end of books and articles that you can find. And really no end of detail that you can tell or rabbit holes you can go down. To keep this episode short, I'm going to focus only on why Laura began writing a book and how it changed from her initial idea to what gets published. This episode will cover the first part.
Speaker 1:Let's start with our end in mind. What was the result? Harper Brothers Publishing released Little House in the Big Woods in April of 1932 . Laura was 65 at the time. The book sold well even during the growing economic depression.
Speaker 1:To tell the full story of how we got there, we would have to go back much earlier in Laura's life. I'm not gonna do that here. Instead, we're only gonna go back a few years to start this part of our story. Early in 1930, Laura Ingalls Wilder set out to write her memoir. Her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, had been pushing her for years to record stories from her youth, and especially to write down the stories of Laura's father and his homesteading days.
Speaker 1:Laura was doing it now because now she had more motivation. Her sister Mary had died a little more than a year before. Sadly for her, both of her parents were now gone. And she knew that if she didn't put down these stories, they were gonna be lost.
Speaker 1:She had asked for reflections from an elderly aunt still living who was back in the Wisconsin woods where Laura had been born and where her parents had met and where Laura had grown up at least for part of her life. And what she got back was two different letters with dozens of pages of reflections, including songs, recipes, sort of detailed reflections on what was life like and what her aunt remembered. And because of these letters, when Laura sat down to write, she had more than just her own memories to pull from.
Speaker 1:She had also written for a kind of local newspaper called the Missouri Ruralist. It was a farmer newspaper. And occasionally she would include reflections, so she had some experience writing about and talking about these things.
Speaker 1:The other reason why she was motivated was she also wanted to earn money. Coming up, there was the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the town of De Smet later that summer that she and Almanzo wanted to attend, or maybe Rose wanted them to attend even more than than Laura wanted to go. Also, Rose's stockbroker had lost a bunch of money in the stock market crash, both her own and her parents, Laura and Almanzo. The stock market crashed in October of nineteen twenty nine and this is traditionally seen as the beginning of the Great Depression. Rose also had undertaken various building projects on the farm, Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri, including Rose set out to build a new house for Laura and Almanzo.
Speaker 1:It was typical of Rose to struggle to live within her means and Rose, a professional writer, wasn't writing. As a professional writer, Rose seemed to currently be under enough stress and strain that either she couldn't or wouldn't write. The stage then in early nineteen thirty is that Laura, now 63 years old, got to work writing, hoping to find a market for the stories of her life.
Speaker 1:Laura got to work and worked steadily, writing by hand using a number two pencil and school writing tablets. She had a typewriter but didn't use it. Instead, she filled up six tablets, numbering them one through six, and wrote across the first one, Pioneer Girl. In the tablets she told the sweep of her girlhood from age two through 18, traveling from Kansas to Wisconsin to Minnesota and finally to the Dakota territories. She wrote in the first person, and Laura failed to include chapter headings and put in really only a few section breaks. As she wrote, she put notes to herself in the margin and she also wrote some notes and questions to her daughter Rose in the margins. Laura finished her work in early May and handed over her six notepads to Rose for review and typing.
Speaker 1:Rose was living on the farm in the separate house, and presumably they would have had conversations about this, and presumably this was planned, that Laura would sit down and write, and Rose was going to type it up for her. Rose made quick work of her role. When she was done typing, the manuscript was 160 pages, and from the time that she got the tablets until she sent the manuscript off to New York was less than ten days. Once done, Rose then mailed the typed manuscript off to her literary agent, Carl Brandt. In the late 1920s and 1930s, juvenile publishing, in other words, publishing books targeted at kids, was still pretty new in a way but was a growing segment of book publishing. Or at least it was growing before the Great Depression. Brandt himself didn't have much experience with it, and the Pioneer Girl, the memoir isn't obviously aimed at kids. Also, the idea of young adult or YA books didn't really exist. It wasn't a thing.
Speaker 1:Brandt, when he received the manuscript, he offered it up to various magazines for interest in serializing Laura's story, but he got no takers. He ended up mailing the manuscript back to Rose only a month after receiving it.
Speaker 1:When Rose got the manuscript back, she had to decide what to do with it. She now had some of her own projects that she could turn to, but at least based on her actions, she must have thought that her mom had something in the stories that she had put together. Rose obviously wants money and thinks earning additional money is important for the family, and money is kind of a constant refrain in her letters and journals, sometimes more pressing than others but pretty constant.
Speaker 1:In response to getting the rejected manuscript back, Rose began revising the memoir. In the revisions, she polished it up and tried to build a stronger narrative. In addition, some of the considered revisions to Pioneer Girl are kind of wild. Rose revises it to make the story stronger, she makes it a bit more literary, and she also tries to spice it up.
Speaker 1:In one draft, Rose inserts the story of a family of serial killers. This isn't a joke. She adds them early in the manuscript likely as a way to grab the reader's attention and to persuade editors to buy the story. Ultimately, it it doesn't stay in, and it is based on fact that would have overlapped with at least part of the family's history.
Speaker 1:Rose then likely sent the revised manuscript back to Brandt. Despite Rose's revisions, however, Brandt again turned it down and told her the memoir wasn't marketable. With the full manuscript revisions, it isn't clear how involved Laura was with any of those.
Speaker 1:As the summer of 1930 turns into fall, little or no money is coming in from writing. The summer was really hot. Rose is ready to get out of Rocky Ridge Farm and to get out of town. She decides to return to New York to better address her and her mother's work. Once there, Rose meets with her agent Brandt.
Speaker 1:Presumably they talk about Rose's work, including short stories that she had written or has in the works. They also cover the Pioneer Girl memoir and he advises Rose not to try to sell it. Rose, however, disagrees. In addition to then firing Brandt as her agent and getting a new agent, she also shops around her mother's memoir. Rose is essentially acting as literary agent for her mother. Like Brandt, she pursues magazines and not books. Rose thought that getting a book deal would be relatively easy but wanted a magazine placement first. Magazines could pay better, and if you had a successful serial published in a magazine, particularly a well regarded national magazine, it would only benefit the later book, both the contract negotiations and the sale. And for writers serializing a story in a national magazine was a way to get paid for the same work twice. But Rose, just like her fired agent, had no success.
Speaker 1:She did get some positive comments from the Saturday Evening Post but got no contract offers. The Post essentially said that while the writing was good, they already had something in their vault that was a lot like it. They also said that if the story had used the same material as a basis for fiction instead of memoir, they would be very interested.
Speaker 1:We've already covered the memoir and the memoir revisions, so the revisions to that Pioneer Girl manuscript. But Rose did something else that will prove more central to our story, and I haven't figured out if she did this while she was on the farm in Missouri on Rocky Ridge Farm or later when she comes back to New York, and it might have been while she was in New York.
Speaker 1:But she took excerpts from Pioneer Girl and turned them into a kid's story focused just on the family's time in Wisconsin. She might have collected those stories while she was editing the manuscript. She had pulled out stories or parts that seemed too juvenile to keep in a book that was aimed at adults. Then she took those stories and formed them, or at least many of them, into a new juvenile manuscript. Part of the motivation had been to preserve stories that her grandfather had told her or had told her mother, and keeping those and packaging them up was probably pretty attractive both to her and to Laura.
Speaker 1:When she finished this work, that new manuscript was just over 20 pages typed. And if you read it, it does sound very much like an early draft, sort of a partial draft, of what would later become Laura's first book. We are going to leave our story here for now and pick it back up on the next episode. In that next episode, Rose has a little more work to do, But after that, the role of the unsung hero of this story will shift from her to Marian Fiery of Alfred A. Knopf Publishing. And in that episode, we're gonna leave behind pioneer girl and the memoir manuscript and instead shift our attention to this new juvenile manuscript that Rose has put together.
Speaker 1:For the postscript on this part of our story, I wanna close the loop on that Pioneer Girl manuscript. So during Laura's life, she never gets the Pioneer Girl memoir published. It also isn't published during Rose's life either. People know it exists, and even though the Little House books become quite popular, no one ever goes out and publishes it. That changes much more recently in the last several years.
Speaker 1:There is a publishing house connected with the South Dakota Historical Society, And they take up really yeoman's work in going through the various manuscripts, putting together a book with source material, footnotes, annotations, as well as pictures and various graphics and other things that tell the story of how this book was created and how it was written.
Speaker 1:If you found this part of our story at all interesting or you wanna learn more about Pioneer Girl or Laura Ingalls Wilder's first writing, I encourage you to look at the book I just mentioned, Pioneer Girl, the annotated autobiography by Laura Ingalls Wilder. It was edited by Pamela Smith Hill and published by the South Dakota Historical Society Press in 2014. One of the interesting things is, as you probably won't be surprised to hear, the South Dakota Historical Society Press is a pretty small operation. Publishing this book was a bonanza for them. They sell out of the first printing really, really quickly. They end up having to hire more staff, and this is really a financial boon for them. So if you're interested, it's really beautifully made, really well put together, and pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:Join me next time for another episode of I'll Probably Delete This where we'll explore more stories of authors, storytellers, great books, maybe even serial killers, and the publishing industry. Happy Reading
Speaker 1:Happy Reading. Thanks everybody.
