Now that the illustrious day has arrived, I can let the cat out of the bag:  My panel with fellow Laura fan and writer Wendy McClure, Loving Laura in a Lindsay Lohan World, has been accepted for the 2010 Laurapalooza Little House on the Prairie fan and academic convergence this July in Mankato, MN!  My inner Ingalls is doing a brisk jig.

In celebration of Laura, here are some fun facts about the mother of the Little House on the Prairie books:

• In her later years, Laura was notoriously frugal, probably because of the many years of disaster she endured both as a girl pioneer and as wife in a family plagued by economic and physical hardship.  When financial times got hard (the family lost much of their money in the stock market crash of 1929), a standard money-saving suggestion was to turn off the electricity.
• Laura was a fierce competitor and once declared that she would live to 90 because her husband, Almanzo, had.
• Laura wasn’t “just” a writer…she was a poultry and farming expert who was widely sought after for her advice and input on rural life.
• Rose Wilder Lane wasn’t Laura’s only child.  She had a son, never named, who died soon after his birth in 1889.
• When Laura’s books took off, she didn’t keep her earnings all to herself.  Instead, she sent several young people through college and provided for her parents in their old age.
• Laura was truly a “half-pint of cider half drunk up”…she stood four feet eleven inches tall.
• The Little House on the Prairie books were originally written as a long-form memoir for an adult audience, but Laura’s daughter Rose convinced her to try it for the children’s market after it failed to sell.  Laura’s sister Carrie apparently provided both moral support and supplemented Laura’s writing with her own memories.

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