Seven of the Little House books chronicle these years, often spent in isolated places with only her immediate family, encountering disasters of biblical proportions. As I reread the novels myself, I found myself identifying not so much with Laura as with Ma and Pa, while taking greater notice of the more forbidding touches just beyond the awareness of the children.īorn near Pepin, Wisconsin, in 1867, Laura Ingalls Wilder spent most of her childhood on the move-to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, to the prairies of Minnesota and Iowa, and finally to De Smet, South Dakota, she and her family always trudging onward in the hope of something better. “Darker aspects of the material come forth.” Quite true. When you read them as an adult and you are divorced from that apparatus, you tend to see them more as text and less a children’s book,” says Caroline Fraser, editor of the LOA volumes. “It was an interesting exercise to publish the books without the illustrations. The Library of America volumes do not include the iconic drawings that Garth Williams produced for the 1953 edition, but they do contain a letter and speeches by Wilder, a chronology, and extensive notes on the text. Last year the Library of America released a new two-volume edition of Wilder’s nine books- Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy, Little House on the Prairie, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, and The First Four Years. Over sixty million copies of the Little House books were sold between 19. It was nearly a cult after the 1971 paperback boxed edition of Wilder’s books was published, which then ballooned once the television series produced by Michael Landon came along in 1974. There were a whole slew of us Wilder girls. We would sometimes visit Abbe Creek, a restored one-room schoolhouse in my little hometown in Iowa, and spend the afternoon there, pretending it was the nineteenth century. I was always Carrie, and my friend Meredith Wilch was always Laura. I remember as an eight-year-old incessantly playing “Little House on the Prairie.” My mother had lovingly sewn for me an ensemble of calico dress and bonnet, bloomers, and an apron, which my daughter now wears for dress-up. Wilder wrote about her childhood for readers who were still enjoying theirs, many of whom developed a great fondness for her characters and their pioneer world.
Those are the last words in the first book by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was sixty-five years old when it was first published.
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder They could not beįorgotten, she thought, because now is now.
She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and
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