More Missouri Moments: Rose Wilder Lane – Caroline Fraser

Season Description

Premiering in September 2018, the Our Missouri Podcast's inaugural season opens with Bob Priddy discussing his book, “The Art of the Missouri Capitol.” From that auspicious start, listeners can explore all corners of the state from Kansas City and the Missouri River Valley to the Governor's Mansion, the Ozarks, and the Land of Big Red Apples. Season 1 also features conversations on key topics, including Genealogy, National History Day, and Missouri's Bicentennial.

Episode Description

In 1935, Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, was at a crossroads in her life. Financially, she had weathered the low points of the Great Depression but still found herself on unstable ground after orchestrating the construction of a new building called the Rock House on her family's Mansfield property. Personally, the relationship between Rose and her mother had grown especially strained. In this More Missouri Moments mini-episode of the Our Missouri Podcast, Caroline Fraser, our guest from "Episode 2: Prairie Fires," takes us to the summer of 1935 when Rose Wilder Lane moved into the Tiger Hotel in Columbia and began work on what would become an unsuccessful book project about Missouri history.

 

Episode & Banner Image: Cabin at Summersville, Missouri, ca. 1880 [South Central Missouri, Photograph Collection (P1125), SHSMO]

About the Guest

Caroline Fraser

Caroline Fraser holds a PhD in English and American Literature from Harvard University. She is the author of God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church and Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution. Additionally, she served as editor of the Library of America edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. Her work has also appeared in the New YorkerThe Atlantic Monthly, and Outside Magazine, among others. Her most recent book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, Plutarch Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

Episode Transcript