There's a lot of talk about Laura Ingalls Wilder this week. I confess I didn't love the books as much as Sarah did when we were younger, but I grew to love Wilder when I moved to Missouri as an adult. What I love most about her is not the books but the fact that she left her entire literary income--all her royalties from those bestselling books--to the public library she helped to found in Wright County, MO. (Actually, it was a life bequest to her only daughter, Rose. On Rose's death, all the money was to go to a little public library system.) Did the money go to the library? Nope. It went to Rose's Harvard-educated lawyer, Roger Lee MacBride, who passed himself off as Rose's "adopted grandson" for years. He profited, as did his family, and the NY publisher. Everyone but the little library Wilder hoped to endow. To my mind, that's the bitter irony in this tale: Laura had more in common with ripped-off Native Americans than she knew.
