Rose Wilder Lane was born on the family homestead in DeSmet, Dakota Territory (now South Dakota) on Dec. 5, 1886. She was the only surviving child of Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder. She was educated in a one room school house in Missouri where they moved seeking a milder climate for Almanzo's health.
Following graduation she took a job as a telegrapher, a newly opened field for a woman, for Western Union in Kansas City. In 1909, she married Gillette Lane but they divorced eight years later. She was fiercely independent and moved to San Francisco where she sold real estate and began to write for the San Francisco Bulletin and Sunset Magazine. Her first book, "The Biography of Henry Ford" was published in 1917, followed in 1920 by "The Biography of Herbert Hoover". She also was the ghost writer for Frederick O'Brien's "White Shadows on the South Seas" while living in Greenwich Village.
In 1920, she began traveling annually to Albania where she lived in a primitive hut in the mountains and was often the first "foreign" woman any of the natives had ever seen. In 1923, she wrote "The Peaks of Shala" about her experiences in Albania. After World War I, she became a reporter for the American Red Cross and wrote about conditions in war torn countries. She adopted an Albanian boy, Rexh Meta, who saved her life during this time and later paid for his college education in America.
In 1924, she returned to Rocky Ridge Farm briefly with her best friend Helen Boylston but neither were content there and soon returned to Albania together publishing their journal, "Travels with Zenobia".
The unstable political situation in Albania forced them back to Missouri in 1928 where she and Helen moved into the Rocky Ridge Farmhouse and she had a modern rock house built for her parents on the same property. When she lost her money in the stock market crash of 1929 she returned to her pen to earn a living and assisted her mother, with whom she was very close, get her Little House Series published.
In her later years she became increasingly anti-government. She retired to her farm in Danbury Connecticut, in 1943 until "the American scene produced a politician who'll stand up and tell the truth." She particularly abhorred Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. In 1944 she stopped writing altogether to avoid paying taxes to finance the New Deal. She died at home in 1968 at the age of eighty-one.