Recently Read: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser

 

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.

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Recently Read: West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, San Francisco, 1915

 

A short but packed collection of letters Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote home to her husband Almanzo in 1915, West From Home details her train ride from Missouri to San Francisco, the stay with her professional writer daughter, Rose, and their frequent visits to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

This book, also containing relevant photographs from the era, will appeal to those interested in San Francisco history, those interested in the 1915 world's fair, and those interested in the further adventures of Laura. Her descriptions of the fair and beyond are captivating, and they're mixed (never intending to be published) with recommendations to Almanzo about the upkeep of their farm, her descriptions of Rose's working life, and an under-the-surface concern that Rose and her partially out of work husband may not be able to pay back a major loan to her and Almanzo.

West From Home compels me to want to read more of Laura's writing, more of Rose's work (she hobnobbed with violinist Fritz Kreisler, Henry Ford and other famous artists and celebrities) and biographies of both. The family's upward mobility, from Laura and her family barely surviving the deadly 1880 "Long Winter" to Rose being a successful author in one generation is astonishing. In 1915, the "Little House" books were in both author's futures and it will be fascinating to learn more about the collaborative process that enabled them to be written and published.

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Recently Read: By the Shores of Silver Lake, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Some children's books begin in happiness and end in tragedy. By the Shores of Silver Lake, the fifth book in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House book series, is the opposite. The first chapter isn't finished before one tragedy is reported and another transpires (no spoilers here). I believe it may be here when my granddaughter (age seven) stopped reading the series.

Though not as strong as the previous volumes, Silver Lake captivates with the family moving to what will be De Smet, South Dakota. The building of a railroad through the territory and the commerce and small population which follows it result in a town quickly coming to life out of and in the wilderness. The long descriptions of the building of the railroad will surely try many readers' patience (they did mine); a rare miscalculation in the construction of this volume. The vivid evocation of the area, though, with its lake, wolves, myriad birds and many-textured terrain will remain with the reader. As Laura grows older, the novel also touches on union conflicts, the decimation of the buffalo population, drunken homesteaders, and Laura and a friends' first interest in the opposite sex. Appropriately, her future husband, Almanzo Wilder, makes a cameo appearance.

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Recently Read: Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

What a wonderful, complex book. Little House on the Prairie covers nearly a year when the Ingalls family left their home in Wisconsin to build a new house and life on the Indian territory plains of Kansas. The hardships and beauties of such a life are told vividly. Despite some critic's misgivings about Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter's editing input into the creation of the books, the autobiographical stories told here ring true, poignant, memorable and sad. Children will be reading and learning from this book for a hundred years.

How tragic and ridiculous it is that the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, has removed Wilder’s name from her own award, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award - primarily due to a conversation in the book wherein a racist neighbor expresses a racist remark about Native Americans. These particular ALA justice warriors must believe the primary object of children's literature is to coddle, mollify, pamper and protect children from any viewpoint - even a fictionalized viewpoint - which doesn't make them feel good about their race/gender/age/whatever. History and our present reality is much more complex and nuanced, though, as today's children will soon realize when they enter the adult world. And then there's the true cliche, 'Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.', which makes it very important for young readers to learn about past racial injustices.

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