Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farm wife and local columnist, first book at 65
She was teaching in a prairie school at 15 and farming for decades. Her first book, Little House in the Big Woods, came out in 1932, when she was 65.
Work from the start
Laura Ingalls was born in 1867 in Wisconsin, and her family moved again and again across the American Midwest. She earned a teaching certificate at 15 and taught in small country schools to help her family, before marrying Almanzo Wilder in 1885.
Hard years
Early married life brought crop failures, illness and debt. In 1894 the family moved to Mansfield, Missouri, and slowly built up a farm over many years of work.
Writing on the side
From 1911 she wrote a column for a farm paper, the Missouri Ruralist, about home and farm life, and kept it up for over a decade. It was practice, paid a little, and gave her a voice.
What came of it
In her early sixties she wrote down her childhood memories. Little House in the Big Woods was published in 1932, when she was 65, and the series that followed has been read by children ever since.
Her years of writing a small farm column were the training for the books. Regular small work, done well, builds skills you can use later.
The myth: She did not write alone. Her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a professional writer, edited and shaped the manuscripts closely, and historians still discuss how much.
Where the facts come from: Pamela Smith Hill (ed.), Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (2014); Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires (2017).
