• Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about fairies and fairy tales at various times in her career, and her first book reads like a fairy tale.
• The first illustrator of the Wilder books, Helen Sewell, also illustrated Cinderella.
• Rose Wilder Lane had an FBI file.
  

  Cinderella written and illustrated by Helen Sewell, 1934

• When Lane left Missouri in 1937, she did not return until her father’s death in 1949.
• Wilder’s Pioneer Girl was rejected many times, not only in the 1930s but also in the 1980s.
• Wilder never supported the passage of woman suffrage and, after it became law, only urged women to vote so that politics would not become unbalanced.
• Lane was a yellow journalist.
• She taught her mother how to be one, too.
• Nobody died in the Little Houses.
• Wilder ended most of her books with song.
• The Benders of Kansas were most likely never caught.
• Wilder spent significant portions of her childhood working outside of the Little Houses in order to help support her family.
• Caroline Ingalls also worked outside the home at times to increase family income.
• The Little House narrative is one of interdependence.
• Lane had visions of writing a multi-volume novel based on United States history.
• After 1938, Lane wrote almost no fiction.
• Lane’s best-known book is probably The Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework.
• After Almanzo died, Wilder kept a gun close-by for protection in her farmhouse, where she lived alone.
• Lane went to Vietnam in 1965 as a war correspondent.
• Wilder spent most of her life in southern Missouri, but she immortalized the landscape and values of the upper Midwest (Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota).
• We can always return to the Little Houses where everyone is eternally young and adults behave as they are supposed to.

Nancy Tystad Koupal