For anyone who's read Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books, Caroline Fraser's biography of Wilder pulls back the curtain on what was true, false and romanticized in that beloved series and goes far in researching and clarifying who wrote the books and how they were written. Meticulously researched, its 500 page plus text footnoted, Fraser goes beyond Wilder's life to give historical, political, and social contexts; tracing Wilder's family back to the 17th century, Fraser reveals character traits which carried through till the last of the family's members, in the late 1960s.
Of necessity, Prairie Fires is also the story of Wilder's daughter and sometimes collaborator Rose Wilder Lane, a complex and somewhat tragic, larger than life world adventurer, sufferer of mental illness, reporter, author and, ultimately, a political polemicist who would have been at home and flourished in today's divided climate (in fact, she, in many ways, helped to create it).
Prairie Fires was written with care, precision, artistry and empathy. The Pulitzer Prize it won is well deserved.
