Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

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An Amazon Best Book of November 2017: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books are perhaps the best known and beloved American stories for children. Some of the books’ fame is thanks with their afterlife in Michael Landon’s long-running television series, which Caroline Fraser describes as “not so much an adaptation as a hyperbolic fantasy spin off.” But the question of verisimilitude doesn’t begin and end with television. Though Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, her politically cranky journalist daughter, defended the books’ historical accuracy, Fraser’s meticulous, smart, historically informed biography shows where the books hew to – and diverge from – the facts of Wilder’s long and eventful life. Fraser looks, too, at emotional truths: Wilder’s father, Charles Ingalls, whom she called Pa, is the hero of her recollections. But he dodged service in the Civil War, put his family in harm’s way, and tried to settle on land he knew belonged to the Osage. This image of Charles Ingalls, Fraser writes, “contains elements of moral ambiguity missing from the portrait his daughter would one day so lovingly polish.” Fraser got a head start on her work for this biography when she edited the Library of America editions of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writing. Even readers who have already enjoyed those annotated volumes will find a trove of new material in Prairie Fires, which puts the books in a richer, more complicated context without undermining their value. Fraser concludes, “They are not, as Wilder and her daughter had claimed, true in every particular. Yet the truth about our history is in them. …Anyone who would ask where we came from and why, must reckon with them.” —Sarah Harrison Smith, The Amazon Book Review