one thing leads to another

...I'm not going to regale you with horror stories about all the terrible texts I encountered while sampling the electronic titles available for children and teens; about the insipid, clumsily illustrated picture books or the promising reminiscence on Laura Ingalls Wilder turned jaw-dropping rant, which concluded that Laura's daughter Rose could never have ghost-written the Little House books because she wasn't moral or happy enough ("Rose was not a Little House person"). It would be too easy, and take too long. - Christine Hepperman, "Reading in the Virtual Forest," The Horn Book Magazine, November 2000

Today, I was pointed to THIS online article with Little House on the Prairie reference (see above), but I couldn't quite place the e-book it referred to.

A little googling and it turns out that the e-book in question is Dan L. White's Laura Ingalls' Friends Remember Her. I'd never bothered to download it (you can also buy a printed copy), because I mistakenly assumed that the e-book was the same as the silver-covered 1992 booklet once sold at the Laura Ingalls Wilder / Rose Wilder Lane Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri, titled Laura's Friends Remember, by Dan L. White and Robert F. White.

The original 40-page booklet contained reminiscences by Nava Austin, Erman and Peggy Dennis, Emogene Fuge, Neta Seal, Anna Gutschke, and Carl Hartley. These are included in the 172-page e-book - which is undated but must have been written shortly after William Holtz's Ghost in the Little House was released. There are additional chapters about the Wilders' move to the Ozarks, what made Laura's books so happy, Laura's thoughts on country life, "Did Rose Write Laura's Books?", Laura's thoughts on home and family, and Laura's lonely Little House. It's the authorship chapter that Hepperman found so unsettling.

You can purchase White's e-book for $9 from Ashley Preston Publishing HERE, or read most of the Rose chapter (and others) online for free at googlebooks HERE to see if you're interested. Although White doesn't use footnotes or give any sources for his information, his opinions are interesting (even though I disagree with him about Rose!), and Laura Ingalls' Friends Remember Her does contain written memories about the Wilders that you simply aren't going to find anywhere else.
- posted by pioneergirl at 8:49 PM