Prairie Fires

Laura Ingalls Wilder maintains an avid fanbase in spite of reappraisals of her racial attitudes; and re-encountering her as an adult can be an exciting, disappointing, jarring, but fascinating experience. Caroline Fraser sorts through the semi-autobiographical sources, not least of which are their fictional writings, of Wilder and her collaborator daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, all of which they infused with their own nostalgia and libertarianism. The tortured landscape becomes almost another living figure, as well, since natural disasters set the scene for the novels and their writing. The books’ creation, their influences, and, in turn, their influence in the mythmaking… show more.

I read the Little House on the Prairie books obsessively as a kid, and could still recall whole passages and every illustration when I read them to my sons decades later. But the history behind them, both the period of America's development they depict and the story of how they came to be, is full of complications and attitudes the series elides or outrightly ignores. I treasure this book, which won the Pulitzer Prize, for the deep context it gives about the political and social context surrounding these stories and the true history of the Ingalls and Wilder families. Meeting… show more.