Free Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen

sixty-two years old, Rose forty-three. By then, Rose had made a name with her articles, stories, and biographies; she had traveled in Europe, found friendships with other writers, mapped out ideas for future trips, future books. But she wanted to be a novelist. So she went home to Rocky Ridge, thinking she could have her own quiet space for work, and in her spare time help her mother with
Pioneer Girl
. For years, both women wrote the same territory of the Ingalls family’s adventures westward.
    Rose sent
Pioneer Girl
to her agent but he returned it soon enough, rejected by numerous publishers. An editor friend suggested that the memoir could be made into a series of books for young readers. Quickly Rose and her mother reshaped the pages into a new manuscript,
When Grandma Was a Little Girl
, what would later become
Little House in the Big Woods
. Harper & Brothers published it in 1932, the same year the
Saturday Evening Post
serialized Rose’s novel
Let the Hurricane Roar
. Over the next ten years the two women would collaborate on the rest of the
Little House
books.
    Laura wasn’t a born writer; her personal jottings, her column for the
Missouri Ruralist
, and
The First Four Years
, which Rose never edited, show a spare, wooden style. If Laura’s narration was the flatness of prairie, then Rose’s was all hills and mountains, metaphor and suspense. Still, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that a critic, William Holtz, brought this discrepancy to the forefront, going so far as to argue that Rose had ghostwritten the
Little House
books. But Rose never had any interest in claiming them under her own name. She had no desire, she said, to attach herself to “juveniles.” She couldn’t have known how the future, its legacies and obscurities, would shake out. By the time
These Happy Golden Years
, the last planned book in the series, came out in 1943, she’d achieved her own literary renown with the 1938 best-selling novel
Free Land
.
    Except I’d never heard of it. Who had? Until recently, all I’d known of Rose had come from the TV show and
The First Four Years
. Her name had so fallen into obscurity that she had become a mere afterthought.
    â€”
    T hese were the baseline facts, gathered from the web and from the Holtz book I’d found at a used bookstore, that were circling through my mind when I stepped into the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. Rose had been pals with Hoover back in the day and been his first biographer, which was why her papers were there. Pictures of him, looking stern but trying to smile, lined the walls, leading the way to a back room where archives were kept.
    I’d always loved the stillness of academic libraries, the comfort and competition of being surrounded by people involved in slow, scholarly endeavors. The library at the Hoover wasn’t exactly a Newberry or Beinecke, but the kind of place that reminded me of home: a reading room time-warped to three decades past, with rust-colored carpet and microfiche readers the size of early IBM computers. A small band of researchers squinted over Hoover’s notes and newspapers, setting up cameras on tabletop tripods to record their findings. They were a standard lot—frumpy and frowning, pallid and disheveled. Only a couple of them glanced at me, disapprovingly, I thought. Suddenly I felt silly in the bright turquoise ballet flats that I’d thought were so cute, with their little gold lamé bows. Like a lot of Asian people, I probably looked younger than I was.
    The librarian, a skinny guy who looked a lot like an engineering grad student I’d dated a couple years back, looked up from the journal article he was reading as I approached the desk. He asked me to sign in and list my affiliation. “I’m Ron,” he said. “I’m here to help but, just so you know, we can’t provide any change for the Xerox machine.” He printed