Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.life From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Ghostwriting flap haunts 'House' series Date: Fri, 30 Oct 92 15:33:28 EST Message-ID: \SE E;LIFE \SS (WS) \HD Ghostwriting flap haunts 'House' series \BY ASSOCIATED PRESS \DT KANSAS CITY, Mo. KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved "Little House" books about life on the American frontier in the late 1800s were ghostwritten by her daughter, a professor contends. William Holtz, a University of Missouri professor of English, credits Rose Wilder Lane with everything that makes the children's books "stand up and sing." "I am saying the daughter substantially rewrote it, excising parts, writing dramatic themes, changing dialogue. If this isn't ghostwriting, what is?" Mr. Holtz said in a telephone interview from Columbia Wednesday. In a forthcoming book, Mr. Holtz challenges the image of Mrs. Wilder as a literary Grandma Moses of the Ozarks. Some of Mr. Holtz's colleagues dispute his conclusion, saying the two writers collaborated and Mrs. Lane was simply an editor for the series published in the 1930s. "[Mrs. Lane's] fingerprints are all over those books," says William Anderson, a Michigan author who has written several books on Mrs. Wilder's family. "But I just don't think it is fair to say she did 80 percent or 90 percent of the writing." William Morris, a spokesman for HarperCollins Children's Books, says that if Mrs. Lane had been a ghostwriter, the company would have given her credit as co-author. HarperCollins' predecessor companies published nearly 35 million copies of the books. The books, based on Mrs. Wilder's experiences growing up on the prairie, were translated into dozens of languages and became the basis for the TV series "Little House on the Prairie." Gen. Douglas MacArthur had the books translated into Japanese and distributed in the war-ravaged country "so they would know what real Americans were like," says Connie Tidwell, curator of the Laura Ingalls Wilder-Rose Wilder Lane Home and Museum. Mrs. Wilder, who had the equivalent of an eighth-grade education, began writing books at age 65 at her daughter's urging. She sat at a tiny desk at their home in the Missouri Ozarks and scribbled on paper tablets, some of which are on display at the homestead in Mansfield. By the time she died in 1957, Mrs. Wilder had published 10 books. Another was published after her death. Mrs. Lane died in 1968. Mr. Holtz's claims are made in his biography of Lane, "The Ghost in the Little House," to be published in the spring by the University of Missouri Press. Mrs. Lane's heir gave Mr. Holtz access in 1976 to family letters, diaries and manuscripts. "I think what the manuscripts, the diary and the letters indicate is that [Mrs. Wilder] was an amateurish writer from beginning to end and that everything that makes the 'Little House' books stand up and sing is what the daughter did to them," Mr. Holtz says. He says Mrs. Lane was an established writer before Mrs. Wilder became famous, writing novels, articles for national magazines and biographies of Henry Ford and Herbert Hoover. "Have to finish my mother's . . . juvenile, which has stopped me flat," Mrs. Lane wrote to a friend about Mrs. Wilder's "On the Banks of Plum Creek." "Change the beginning if you want," Mrs. Wilder wrote her daughter. "Do anything you please with [the] stuff if you will fix it up." Mrs. Wilder's manuscripts are noticeably different from the edited "Little House" books and Mrs. Lane wrote entire chapters, Mr. Holtz says. Mr. Anderson, however, says the first two books were published "almost word for word" as Mrs. Wilder wrote them. Aside from improving the books' literary quality, Mrs. Lane injected her libertarian political philosophy, Mr. Holtz says. She hated Franklin D. Roosevelt's vision of an activist government and wanted Americans to remember a time when they were more self-reliant, he said. For example, a character in Mrs. Wilder's manuscript attended a school for the blind on a state subsidy, Mr. Holtz says. Mrs. Lane had the family paying for the girl to attend the school. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM