Credo The Rose Wilder Lane story

Rose Wilder Lane is remembered as the daughter of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder, but as Bagge reveals, she was also a groundbreaking journalist and war correspondent (she traveled to Vietnam at age 78), a pioneering feminist, and a founder of the libertarian movement. Bagge traces her trajectory from a farm girl born on the prairie to eccentric polemicist whose political views ranged from borderline-crackpot to full-out bonkers. Resolutely anti-government, she grew her own food to protest wartime rationing and negotiated her payments downward to avoid being subject to income tax. Her role in her mother's beloved children's novels remains controversial. Ostensibly, her contribution was limited to editing, but Bagge lays out the evidence that she was closer to a ghostwriter. The delightfully loopy, cartoony drawings tell us not to take Lane as seriously as she took herself. Bagge's own libertarian views (he's a longtime contributor to Reason) impart a certain sympathy to Lang, but his humorous bent ensures that her outlandish side receives parity with her undeniable accomplishments.--Gordon Flagg Copyright 2019 Booklist

The idiosyncratic, independent life and work of Rose Wilder Lane-Laura Ingalls Wilder's conservative daughter-gets its due in this spiky graphic biography by Bagge (Fire! The Zora Neale Hurston Story). Bagge's affinity for rendering characters as toothy, rubber-limbed ranters and ravers dovetails neatly with Lane's wild emotional extremes. Born in 1886 in South Dakota, Lane was raised in the Missouri Ozarks after her parents gave up on homesteading. Restless, adventuresome, and bipolar, Lane heads to San Francisco in the early 1900s, where, after an unhappy marriage and a suicide attempt, she becomes a writer. By 1918, Lane is churning out serialized romances and fictionalized biographies (Charlie Chaplin threatened to sue over his). In the decades after, she pursues a bifurcated life: one part as a well-paid women's magazine writer and world traveler, and another as a Missouri homebody not-so-secretly helping her ungrateful mother write the Little House on the Prairie series. Her strong libertarian turn ("F.D.R.'s 'New Deal' is more like a deal with the devil") is given a sympathetic treatment by Bagge, himself a Reason contributor. Yet while he defends her against charges of being an Ayn Rand clone, he admits she was a "conspiracy theorist embarrassingly prone to hyperbole." This loopy, frantic, and personality-packed tribute is fitting for one of America's lesser-known gonzo feminist writers. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.