I’d tell the other kids a story and I’d write everything down later. I remember following my mother around as a tyke, asking her ‘How do you spell “going down the street?”’ See, I was writing a story already. In an interview, she said, “I cannot remember back to a year in which I did not consider myself to be a writer. Unlike Laura Ingalls Wilder, Maud Hart Lovelace always seemed to know that storytelling was her destiny.

Although there’s evidence that the mother-daughter team collaborated in bringing the books to publishable quality, it’s also true that some of the original manuscripts of the Little House series can be seen in museums, written in long-hand on lined paper-proof of Laura’s original work. Some critics of her books have said that her daughter, a professional journalist, did heavy editing and, perhaps, some of the writing. Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65 when her first book, Little House in the Big Woods, was released in 1932. Laura’s columns appeared in the Missouri Ruralist under the heading “The Farm Home” and later, “As a Farm Woman Thinks.” Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons – Laura Ingalls Wilder Maud grew up in Mankato, Minnesota, a stable, yet progressive city, where the finer ladies of the community donned their good dresses and impressive hats, showing off a bit when they strolled up and down Front Street.Īlthough Laura was a teacher while still in her teens, there’s no indication she began writing regularly until she was a farm wife living in the Missouri Ozarks, where she, her husband, Almanzo, and their daughter, Rose, moved to escape the severe South Dakota winters. Most of Laura’s childhood was spent on the prairie of Redwood County, Minnesota, and eastern South Dakota, where talk of homesteads, dugouts and claim shanties was common. …might it be time for each of us to write our story? Each of us can give the gift of history to people 50 or 100 years from now so that they will understand how circumstances have changed over the course of our lives. But Charles Ingalls’ wanderlust brought adventure and, often, instability to his family. Had the Ingalls family stayed in Wisconsin, where Laura was born, perhaps her childhood would have been more like Maud’s-surrounded by extended family members in an established community. These two women, with whom so many children have grown up, gave us the opportunity to experience history as they lived it. Maud, born in 1892, enjoyed the stability of a Midwestern town in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Laura, born in 1867, was a child of the frontier.

Laura Ingalls Wilder and Maud Hart Lovelace, born just 25 years apart in the Upper Midwest, both became writers.

Maud lovelace