A baseball player, who has to depend on a strong arm or a sharp batting eye to break into the lineup, can have his day in the sun come and go overnight. Laura Ingalls Wilder hadn’t even begun her writing career at that age; she wasn’t even “Laura Ingalls Wilder,” for that matter. Rather she would have been known as “Laura,” “Bess,” “Bessie,” or “Mrs. A. J. Wilder” to friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. 28
Laura Ingalls Wilder was the pen name she began to use when she started writing magazine articles and books
Her first professional writing consisted of articles for farm newspapers, mainly for the Missouri Ruralist, which she contributed to from 1911 to 1924. In her twice?a?month columns in the Ruralist, Wilder gave helpful household hints, told stories about everyday life, provided advice about living with other people, commented on events in the news, and-every once in a while-hearkened back to her childhood and related stories about her and her family that she dredged up from her memory bank. By the time that she started writing her autobiography in 1930 and then autobiographical novels between 1932 and 1943, she was relying almost completely upon her memory of events that had occurred half a century earlier. While her ability to recall things that had happened so far in the past was better than average, Wilder frequently became frustrated over her inability to bring back to consciousness events that could have served as grist for her stories. In 1938, while working on her ashley madison sign in sixth book, The Long Winter, she complained in a letter to Rose, “Strange how my memory fails me on all but the high lights.” 29
