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Authors: Rose Wilder Lane and Helen Dore Boylston
Editor: William V. Holtz
Publisher: University of Missouri Press (March 1983)

Synopsis:
An account of the six month journey from Paris to Albania of Helen Dore Boylston and Rose Wilder Lane in 1926.

About the Authors: Rose Wilder Lane and Helen Dore Boylston
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.

Helen Dore Boylston, was author of the Sue Barton nurse series, popular with several generations of young readers.  She was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, graduated as a nurse from Massachusetts General Hospital in 1917, and that year joined the British Army in France.  Miss Boylston drew upon her own experiences as a nurse to create the Sue Barton books, as well as the biography, Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross.  She also wrote Sister: The War Diary of a Nurse, published in 1920 by Atlantic Monthly Press.  In 1926, she traveled with Rose Wilder Lane from France to Albania, co-writing an account of their motor journey, Travels With Zenobia.  The seven Sue Barton books were published between 1936 and 1953 and sold millions of cloth copies in this country and in European translations. Miss Boylston died in Trumbull, Connecticut on September 30, 1984 at the age of 89.

About the Editor: William V. Holtz
William Victor Holtz was born in Pontiac, Michigan, on April 9, 1932, and grew up in Michigan.  He was educated in Michigan and Washington, earning a BA from the University of Michigan in 1954, an MA from the University of Washington in 1955, and a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1965.  He is the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor Emiritus in the Department of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia and has been employed by the University of Missouri-Columbia, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Michigan.  His professional publications are many, including work on Charlotte Bronte, Dorothy Thompson, Rose Wilder Lane, Samuel Johnson, Sinclair Lewis, and others.

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