I just finished a joint biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father that was quite good, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson.

Oh, cool. I find the Alcotts endlessly fascinating.

Speaking of classic children's lit authors and their relatives, I've been meaning to order Ghost in the Little House, a bio about Rose Wilder Lane. I'm not a fan of what I've heard is the author's theory that RWL was the ghost-writer of the Little House books, but I still find her life fascinating, so I'm interested in reading this.

Oh, don't say that! Half Pint totally wrote the books!

::clings to illusions::

Well, from what I understand, this author takes the original one-volume manuscript called "Pioneer Girl" and compares it to the final manuscripts for the individual books, taking into account that Rose did take the individual book mss from her mother and shape them up a bit before passing them onto the editor. I think what is closer to the truth is that she polished them up a tad, but didn't do the extensive work that the bio author supposes. Laura was an experienced newspaper writer and not the almost-novice that the bio author makes her sound like. Rose probably did more of making each book progressively more complex for advancing reading skills (one of my favorite aspects of the series) than Laura did.

In reading The First Four Years, one probably gets more of straight-Laura writing in its rawer form before it got cleaned up from both Laura and Rose. It was found in Laura's writings after both she and Rose passed away, IIRC, and was barely edited before publishing. Laura apparently just found the subject matter too depressing to work on after first writing it, especially after losing Almanzo in 1947.

God, it's been so long since I've read them. At this point I'm sort of waiting (especially since they're boxed up at the moment) to read them aloud to Sara, rather than digging into them again myself.

Thanks for the tidbits, Kathy! I had no idea about most of that.

Signed,

Just found out three years ago that there was no Carolyn Keene

Cool and/or sad Little House book tidbits I've discovered on the Internet:

(Sad) Cap Garland died only a few years after Laura and Almanzo were married, when a thresher boiler blew up and killed him and several other farm workers.

(Also sad) Almanzo felt like a failure for most of his life after being crippled by diptheria (described in The First Four Years) and having to struggle with farming for the rest of his life as a result of the debilitation and lack of sons to help with the farm.

Rose was the only and last blood-descendant of Ma and Pa. Mary never married or had children, and both Carrie and Grace married widowers, but had no children of their own. Rose delivered a stillborn child during her failed marriage to Gilette Lane, but never remarried or had further children after divorcing him around 1917.

(Happier) Lana, the wild-child cousin of Laura's we see in On the Shores of Silver Lake, lost contact with Laura's family soon after they move on from Dakota Territory as seen in that book, but happened to be reading OtSoSL soon after it was published in 1939 and recognized herself. She was able to contact Laura through her publisher and they stayed in contact until she died in 1943.

I've never read the "Little House" books because they were always presented as "girl's books", and thus I assumed they were insipid. Are they less treacly than the TV series would have me think?

They're very... curious books, Connie. They're books about ordinary daily life (among a family of four girls), mostly in frontier territory.

On the one hand, they introduce child-readers to a different way of living: the rhythms of farm-life, the idea of your family being all of your social contact some years, the ordinariness of poverty. On the other hand, they were definitely written in a different era, meaning there's a chapter in one of the later books where Pa and several colleagues dress up in blackface, and everybody finds it hilarious. And you're not necessarily sure whether the narrative voice agrees or not when Ma says, more than once, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

So. Not especially gooey girly stuff; I read it along with Swiss Family Robinson rather than Sweet Valley High.

I'm booktalking Girl, Interrupted tonight but it's been years since I read it. I know it's autobiographical, story of depressed girl who gets put in mental hospital (late 60s), details about other patients. Anything really good that I'm missing?

I'm booktalking Girl, Interrupted tonight but it's been years since I read it. I know it's autobiographical, story of depressed girl who gets put in mental hospital (late 60s), details about other patients. Anything really good that I'm missing?

She's there because she tried to overdose on a bottle of tylenol, I think. It's been ages since I read that book but it's really good.