Children’s Librarian Helen Morgus recommends the “Little House on the Prairie” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
My sweet dad read Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder to me when I could not have been more than five years old. We loved and identified with Laura—headstrong and creative—and her Pa, a paragon of manhood. Craving an escape into a story of American industriousness in the face of hardship, I returned to Laura Ingalls Wilder this past winter and was abundantly rewarded.
The pillars of Wilder’s writing are her meticulous descriptions of the technology of the 1880s, her passion for the land, her love of family, and the Wilders’ sense of duty and devotion to one another. Herein lie many lessons for young readers, and adults will pick up on the tenderness and mutual respect between Laura’s parents, Charles and Caroline.
But there is a troubling flip side.
Wilder wrote her books from the perspective of the late 19th century in which she was embedded. For example, she encounters people of other races, and with a sense of superiority, and adults discipline children with the rod and the whip. Notwithstanding spankings, a blackface minstrel show, Caroline’s visceral fear of Indians, and the unavoidable whiff of Manifest Destiny, there is more to admire about the Wilders than there is to condemn.
Wilder’s accounts (written in her 60s) deal with poverty, hunger, cold, disease, and other trials from a distance that takes the sting out of them. I had to ask myself: was all that self-reliance simply just that? What other forces could have been at work in the Wilders’ successes and failures?
Prairie Fires: the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser, helped answer these questions. Fraser takes us through the period covered in Wilder’s children’s books and through her adult life with her husband Almanzo and their daughter, Rose. Using letters, diaries and the public record, she puts together a more complete historical portrait. I found Fraser’s dive into the U.S. government’s policies toward Indians, and her treatment of the economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries especially helpful.
The “Little House on the Prairie” series withstands the test of time. Perhaps most because it reminds readers of the grit that is baked into the character of people who call themselves Americans.
