Our Recommended Reading for Children & Young Adults and Recommended Reading for Adults articles have been popular resources for readers interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder and Little House on the Prairie. Here is a brief overview of The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority.
Author: Rose Wilder Lane
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (November 5, 2014)
Synopsis:
There is a double meaning, and a double aptness, in the title of The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority. The first “discovery of freedom” is humanity’s, the story told in the book of the historical emergence of property rights, civil liberties, and representative government. The second discovery is that of the reader, who through Lane’s vibrant prose sees a political tradition familiar enough to be taken for granted suddenly charged with new life. As so many over the last six decades have found, a first exposure to Lane’s book realizes that passage from Little Gidding, where T.S. Eliot writes that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
About the Author: Rose Wilder Lane
Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968), was a prolific fiction writer, biographer and political theorist, as well as the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series of children’s books. Lane’s skillful editing and publishing connections assisted her mother in making the transition from rural Ozark journalist to world-renowned children’s author. Lane had left her parent’s impoverished Missouri farm at the age of 17 and soon began to make her mark on the world. After a stint as a Western Union telegrapher, she sold real estate in California and later began a successful career as a reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin. Her 1918 divorce from Gillette Lane, after several years of separation, officially ended a relationship that had never recovered from the death of an infant son around 1910. She never remarried. After her divorce, Lane continued to carve out a successful career as a writer of novels, short stories, biographies and tales of her extensive world travels. Her work as a war correspondent dated from post-WWI Europe to a tour of Vietnam in 1965 (when she was nearly 80 years old). She was a well-known literary figure of her day. Later in life, Lane’s writing focused on her increasing political conservatism, her distaste of Communism, Socialism and any other form of government that denied the freedom of the individual. She is widely regarded as one of the leading figures behind what has grown into the American Libertarian Party. Among her many works are Free Land, Young Pioneers, Diverging Roads, and Give Me Liberty.
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