User talk:Waggie/Archives/2019/February

Rose Wilder Lane
Rose Wilder Lane lived one of those hard-to-believe lives. She was born in 1886 in a Dakota Territory claim shanty to Laura and Almanzo Wilder. The family gave up Plains wheat farming because of illness and crop failures and made a series of moves: to Minnesota (where Rose’s photo was taken), Florida, South Dakota, and finally (in 1894) to a hardscrabble Ozark hill country farm near Mansfield MO. Laura named the small farm Rocky Ridge.

Rose was bright and quick, an eager reader with an excellent memory who devoured every book that came within her reach. But it wasn’t just her intelligence that set her apart: she was marked, she felt, by the family’s poverty, and always felt herself an outsider. She went to school in Mansfield, then to high school in Crowley, LA, where she lived with her father’s sister, Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer. She returned briefly to Mansfield and in 1904, not yet eighteen, took the train to Kansas City to become a telegrapher.In 1909, Rose moved to San Francisco and went to work as a writer/reporter for the San Francisco Call. There, she married Gillette Lane. Their child, a son, was born in 1910 but did not live, and the Lanes spent the next year or so working on promotional schemes involving newspaper subscription services. Back in California in 1911, they sold real estate until the War brought the market down and Rose went to work for the San Francisco Bulletin. Over the next three years, she produced literally hundreds of articles, feature stories (like her reporting on Hetch Hetchy) and serials. Several of her newspaper serials—stories about Henry Ford, Charlie Chapman, aviator Art Smith, and Jack London—were published as books, as well. She also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Diverging Roads. In 1918, Rose and Gillette Lane were divorced. Rose in the Loire Valley, France Rose in the Loire Valley, France

Rose left the Bulletin in 1918 and began her freelance career with magazine articles, a ghostwriting project (White Shadows on the South Seas), and a book, The Making of Herbert Hoover. The war over, she was recruited by the American Red Cross to travel and write articles about the organization’s relief efforts. Her stories, published in national magazines and newspapers, became very popular, as was her book about her travels in Albania, The Peaks of Shala (1923). She went back to the States for a year, then in 1926, she returned to Albania accompanied by her friend Helen (Troub) Boylston. The two rented a villa in Tirana and Rose wrote for such magazines as Country Gentleman, McCall’s, Harper’s Monthly, and Ladies Home Journal. One of her stories won an O. Henry prize; a serial, “Cindy,” earned her $10,000 and was published as a book. During this time, Rose assumed responsibility for the formal education of an Albanian boy, Rexh Meta, whom she had met in 1921. With her encouragement and financial support, Rexh later attended Cambridge. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sawyeali000 (talk • contribs) 19:19, 13 February 2019 (UTC)