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Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder Paperback – August 7, 2018
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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
One of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
The first comprehensive historical biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the beloved author of the Little House on the Prairie books
Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls―the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser―the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series―masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder’s biography. Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder's tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books.
The Little House books, for all the hardships they describe, are paeans to the pioneer spirit, portraying it as triumphant against all odds. But Wilder’s real life was harder and grittier than that, a story of relentless struggle, rootlessness, and poverty. It was only in her sixties, after losing nearly everything in the Great Depression, that she turned to children’s books, recasting her hardscrabble childhood as a celebratory vision of homesteading―and achieving fame and fortune in the process, in one of the most astonishing rags-to-riches episodes in American letters.
Spanning nearly a century of epochal change, from the Indian Wars to the Dust Bowl, Wilder’s dramatic life provides a unique perspective on American history and our national mythology of self-reliance. With fresh insights and new discoveries, Prairie Fires reveals the complex woman whose classic stories grip us to this day.
- Print length656 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateAugust 7, 2018
- Dimensions5.52 x 1.12 x 8.12 inches
- ISBN-101250182484
- ISBN-13978-1250182487
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What's it about?
A comprehensive biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the beloved author of the Little House on the Prairie books, revealing the true story of her life, including her tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“An absorbing new biography [that] deserves recognition as an essential text.... For anyone who has drifted into thinking of Wilder’s ‘Little House’ books as relics of a distant and irrelevant past, reading Prairie Fires will provide a lasting cure.... Meanwhile, ‘Little House’ devotees will appreciate the extraordinary care and energy Fraser devotes to uncovering the details of a life that has been expertly veiled by myth.”
―The New York Times Book Review(front page)
“The definitive biography... Magisterial and eloquent... A rich, provocative portrait.”
―Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Impressive... Prairie Fires could not have been published at a more propitious time in our national life.”
―The New Republic
“Unforgettable... A magisterial biography, which surely must be called definitive. Richly documented (it contains 85 pages of notes), it is a compelling, beautifully written story.... One of the more interesting aspects of this wonderfully insightful book is its delineation of the fraught relationship between Wilder and her deeply disturbed, often suicidal daughter.”
―Booklist(starred review)
“A fantastic book. We’ve long understood the Little House series to be a great American story, but Caroline Fraser brings it unprecedented new context, as she masterfully chronicles the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family alongside the complicated history of our nation. Prairie Fires represents a significant milestone in our understanding of Wilder’s life, work, and legacy.”
―Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie
“Meticulously researched, feelingly told, Prairie Fires is the definitive biography of a major writer who did so much to mold public perceptions of the Western frontier. Once again, Caroline Fraser has shown that she is a master of the careful art of sifting a life, finding meaning in the large and small events that shaped an iconic American figure. Prairie Fires is a magnificent contribution to the literature of the West.”
―Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West
“At last, an unsentimental examination of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s real life on the frontier. Caroline Fraser rescues Wilder from frontier myth and gives us the gritty, passionate woman who endured the harshest experiences of homesteading, loved the Great Plains, and was devastated by their ultimate ruin and loss. Elegantly written and impeccably researched, Prairie Fires is a major contribution to environmental history and literary biography.”
―Linda Lear, author of Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature and Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature
“In the twenty-first century, the tense and secret authorial partnership between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane has emerged as the most complex and fascinating psychological saga of mother-daughter collaboration in American literary history. Caroline Fraser’s deeply researched and stimulating biography analyzes their controversial relationship and places Wilder’s influential fiction in the contexts of other myths of pioneer women and the frontier.”
―Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers and The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe
“Engrossing… Exhilarating… Lovers of the series will delight in learning about real-life counterparts to classic fictional episodes, but, as Fraser emphasizes, the true story was often much harsher. Meticulously tracing the Ingalls and Wilder families’ experiences through public records and private documents, Fraser discovers failed farm ventures and constant money problems, as well as natural disasters even more terrifying and devastating in real life than in Wilder’s writing. She also helpfully puts Wilder’s narrow world into larger historical context.”
―Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Picador; Reprint edition (August 7, 2018)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 656 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1250182484
- ISBN-13 : 978-1250182487
- Item Weight : 1.13 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.52 x 1.12 x 8.12 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #35,353 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #98 in Author Biographies
- #292 in United States Biographies
- #402 in Women's Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Caroline Fraser is the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning biography, "Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder", which also won a National Book Critics Circle award for biography, a Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune, and BIO's Plutarch Award. Her first book, "God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church," is now available in a 20th-Anniversary Edition with a new afterword. God's Perfect Child was selected as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Book Review Best Book. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, and Outside magazine, among others. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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House books.
The positives about this book: Carolyn Fraser didn’t excellent job researching the background of the Ingalls family and giving tidbits about their lives that I wasn’t aware of, such as the part that Freemasonry played in all of their lives. I also really enjoyed the deep dive into what was going on in America at the time - stuff I never learned in school but everyone should really know.
The not so positives about this book include Caroline Fraser’s personal biases which bleed clearly through the second half of the book. If her goal was to complete a character assassination towards Rose Wilder Lane, she succeeded! Her assessments seem unfair and unkind to call her “weird”. Rose may have been a very difficult person, and yet she is not alive to defend herself. How about giving her more credit for her pioneering work as a journalist and writer?
Fraser’s a liberal, who has no compunction about making statements such as “Socialism…helped” farmers on the 19th century frontier or portraying the New Deal solely in terms of compassion for the poor. That’s fine—she’s entitled to her political viewpoint. But it leads her into making omissions no competent historian would make, such as entirely ignoring the critique of the New Deal as a system of cartels for big business. This is a critique even liberals have acknowledged at least a little bit. The Progressive Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis agreed with it, striking down a major part of the New Deal in the 1936 Schechter Poultry case, for instance. But it appears nowhere in Fraser’s book.
That’s important because both Laura Wilder and Rose Lane were intense critics of the New Deal. Lane, particularly, is a major figure in the history of libertarianism. But Fraser never, in her 500+ pages, even attempts to address Lane’s substantive criticisms of the New Deal—even to refute them. Instead, she just asserts that “more discerning” people support government welfare—and she resolutely portrays Lane’s political views as a function of alleged mental illness. Thus we’re told that Lane wrote against the New Deal out of “a personal sense of grievance against the federal government,” or that she opposed FDR because “she found it easier to locate villains outside herself.”
This sort of psychologizing is simply infantile. No doubt Lane was a complex and cantankerous figure, perhaps even unlikeable. But to ascribe her political beliefs to that does a disservice not just to Lane, but to Wilder, who, after all, agreed with her daughter. Fraser recognizes this, so she is forced time and again to portray Wilder as having not REALLY believed in free markets and limited government, or of having somehow been duped by her daughter—which is a demeaning and fundamentally antifeminist perspective, not to mention flat-out wrong. Laura Wilder was no pushover. Fraser’s hostility to Lane transforms into misogyny, in fact; Lane was a remarkably modern figure—a world-traveling independent journalist who refused to compromise her career dreams to settle down to married life; she deserves recognition at least as one of the pioneering female intellectuals of the 20th century—yet Fraser manages to transform this into a character flaw that springs from Lane’s lack of a conscience and failure to act out stereotypically female versions of compassion. This, Fraser says, proves there was something wrong with her. No ’20s chauvinist could’ve said it better. (This is also false; Lane sponsored, at considerable personal expense, the educational and careers of several young people she “adopted” as her own. Fraser manages somehow to make this still more proof of her lack of charity.)
Fraser’s portrayal of opposition to the New Deal as a psychological disorder also does a disservice to those who believe the New Deal was a good idea. That’s because it’s not coupled with any substantive discussion or defense of the New Deal. That’s because it’s not coupled with any substantive discussion or defense of the New Deal. It makes no effort to address its merits, but rests upon an emotionalistic caricature of history, with good guy New Dealers against the Snidely Whipash capitalists. And that leads her into some real whoppers—such as when she quotes Rose Lane’s saying that “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty”—and then calls this a “nationalistic” statement, which is simply the opposite of the correct adjective, whatever one’s own opinion might be. Or her statement that the 1930s was “a time of the most widespread food insecurity Americans had ever known.” Assuming “food insecurity” means anything, surely Americans in, say, 1863 or 1837 or 1873 or 1620 faced worse, no? Or her statement that the Nineteenth Amendment “was the most important advance in civil rights in America since Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” So much for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875. She says that the Ingallses failed as homesteaders—a disputable claim—and then says their generation were essentially duped into homesteading because nobody could really have succeeded at it—also dubious—but then praises Progressive era banking laws that “would have provided a lifeline” to the Ingallses by giving them “low-interest loans”—after just telling us what terrible credit risks they were. And she even claims that “the Chicago tribune [in 1877] urged homeowners pestered by [the homeless] to spike handouts with ‘a little strychnine or arsenic’ and poison men as if they were vermin.” This is just not true. That article was a satire. But because it supports her cartoonish sterotypes of the Gilded Age, she falls for a hoax.
As for historical issues of greater subtlety, they’re far beyond Fraser’s ken. She criticizes Lane for giving Mussolini and Hitler some measured approval in the 1920s and early 30s—ignoring the fact that many conservatives did so, including Winston Churchill. Hardly proof she was a fascist. She praises Laura Wilder for saying that “If I had been the Indians I would have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left [the prairie],” by saying that this “was a startling statement for a woman of her day.” It wasn’t. Such sentimentalism and romanticism—which was certainly well-grounded—was commonplace throughout Wilder’s lifetime and before; see the works of James Fenimore Cooper, for instance.
Her vendetta against Lane also blinds her to BIOGRAPHICAL issues of greater subtlety. Time and again she condemns Lane (and more gently, Wilder) for introducing false or inaccurate anecdotes into their writing—most notably the anecdote about Almanzo narrowly escaping the notorious Bender family of serial killers. But she never addresses the way in which people tell family stories over the years. Families tell stories back and forth over the years and often forget what actually did happen; they don’t always double check their records for factual accuracy. Over generations, these tales evolve and expand, and become treasured, so that they become “lore.” We’ve all seen this happen. Maybe Wilder and Lane knew that the Bender story wasn’t true, but it’s also possible that these tales were told back and forth for so long that they became lore, and they themselves didn’t know what was true or not. In the 1930s, Laura openly said it wasn’t true. But the 50s, did she even remember this? Maybe, maybe not—and Fraser makes no effort to address this. She simply takes the fact that it wasn’t true as proof of Rose’s dishonesty. (The fact that Laura also repeated the story? That’s just proof of Rose’s nefarious influence.)
This sort of sloppiness—even cattiness—ruins the book, which degenerates into a redundant, superficial, attack on Lane and on the libertarian political movement in general. That’s nothing new to libertarians, of course—always the red-headed stepchild—but it’s so poorly done that it not only fails to persuade, but it ends up as neither a satisfying biography nor a satisfying critique of the ideas. I mean, for example, on pages 498-99, she criticizes, of all things, Rose Wilder Lane’s GRAVESTONE—which includes a passage from Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice—for being written in all capital letters. Seriously, she calls this “shouting,” and then says that her dear friend who chose the words, Roger Lea MacBride, “and conservatives like him,” “had not read” Agrarian Justice, which, she says, was an argument in favor of a welfare state. Even putting aside the petty nastiness of such comments, and this dubious characterization of Agrarian Justice, and her misrepresentation of MacBride as a conservative, when he was actually a libertarian, what proof does Fraser have that MacBride and Lane didn’t read Agrarian Justice? She certainly doesn’t provide any.
This book features page after page of such millimeter-deep partisanship.
What it ultimately is, is a failure of imagination. Fraser just can’t CONCEIVE of how someone could have opposed the New Deal in the 30s, and thinks it must just prove that Rose hated poor people, was mentally ill, and didn’t know anything about history (and that she manipulated or brainwashed her otherwise independent-thinking mom). What it really proves is that Fraser doesn’t know, and doesn’t care to learn, about the context of the subject she’s writing about or to understand Laura Wilder or Rose Lane as they understood themselves. That’s a disservice to them and to the reader—and it’s a disappointment, because we all deserve better.
Caroline Fraser relies on unpublished manuscripts, diaries, letters, and other documents that have come to light to tell the true story of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It is a different tale. It is a story of ”poverty, struggle, and reinvention- a great American drama in three acts.” The family suffered much more from poverty than we are led to believe from her Little House books. Things were much more strained between family members, especially that of Laura and her daughter Rose. Laura herself comes across as more bull-headed and obstinate and even a little unlikeable than she does in her own books. Caroline Frasier takes us behind the scenes to see the real life of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
The book is difficult to read simply because of the differences in how I looked at Wilder. It was hard to come to grips that she wasn’t the Laura I watched on television all the time nor was she the Laura of her books. Once I accepted the differences, the book was easier, emotionally, to read. Frasier brings to life a multitalented woman to life and one who is very complex indeed.
This is not a book to be read in one sitting. It is one to be savored and reread as you integrate the story of her life with what you know or think you know. Frasier brings history to life and compares it to fiction.
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Passages using pronouns such as, she said such and such to her, sometimes leaves the reader in doubt as to who is talking to whom.
Bellissimo.
j'ai commandé ce livre récemment paru aux Etats-Unis, car fan depuis toujours de la série La petite Maison dans la Prairie, j'avais été quand même surprise de savoir que dans les livres écrits par Laura Ingalls, il n'y avait pas d'Albert ni de mariage de Mary Ingalls. j'ai donc décidé d'en savoir plus et suis tombée dans un premier temps sur Pioneer Girl, le recueil de souvenirs réellement écrit par Laura, sans les corrections réalisées ensuite par sa fille Rose. Le style est lapidaire, peu enjolivé et franchement rebutant; Mais ce sont les vrais souvenirs de Laura Ingalls jusqu'à son mariage avec Almanzo Wilder.
Dans Prairie Fires, uniquement disponible en anglais, comme tous les ouvrages consacrés à la vraie vie de Laura , l'auteur raconte également l'histoire des pionniers en général. et aussi l'histoire des états du Minnesota, du Dakota et comment les amérindiens ont du sans cesse céder leurs terres, à cause des errements d'Abraham Lincoln. Je suis à la moitié du livre, et le mot qui revient sans cesse dans mon esprit est Pauvreté.
Je recommande néanmoins ce livre pour tous les amoureux de la famille Ingalls, la vraie, et pour ceux qui veulent en savoir plus sur la vie des pionniers. Bémol évidemment, le livre n'est pas traduit, ça ne me pose pas de problème, mais tout le monde ne lit pas l'anglais, et ce serait quand même mieux si une traduction était envisagée.