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I N T R O D U C T I O N In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the state of Kansas was finally closing its few remaining country schools. In the eastern part of the state, where I grew up on a dairy farm, the inefficiency of the old system gave rural schoolchildren only eight months of instruction while their town and city counterparts had the “advantage” of nine months of schooling. We country children thought we knew who had the best of it. But, frankly, the school closings were long overdue. Town children had access to greater resources, better heated buildings, and teachers with their bachelor’s degrees already earned. Some of our teachers, and they tended not to last long in the one-room-school setting, were often still working to earn their primary degrees. Our school “library” at Victory School, Junction 200, was pathetic. We had approximately four shelves of books, which extended only partially along the west side of our small room. They fitted under the windows that we were inclined to stare out whenever the teacher wasn’t looking. Books were a salvation from ignorance and parochialism, but our choice of escapist literature was limited: stories about noble dogs and horses, a Bobbs-Merrill series on American heroes that read about the same from hero to hero, and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series of books. With little hesitation I gravitated toward these “girls’ books” on prairie life; they were a revelation to me, a widening of the narrow horizons of my youth. In the Little House series, I found a family much like my own, with a strong father and mother and with children who mostly obeyed but who spent a great deal of time quarreling and competing with one another. They were a family who struggled against the elements of nature and misfortune, trying to make a more secure place for themselves in a challenging world. Yet they had an eternal constant in family love. From this love came the strength not only to meet life’s challenges but also to be invigorated by them. So it was that I came to hold Laura Ingalls Wilder in high regard. Out the 1 west-facing windows of my own little school on the prairie, I could see the windswept buffalo grass and feel the vastness of the land on which the Ingalls family pioneered. I felt I knew this little family as I knew no other in literature. Their values of family loyalty and courage overcame all obstacles, and this message comforted and reassured me, as it has done the many fans of Laura’s books to this day. Little did I know back then, however, that I was destined to encounter a far more multifaceted and profound Laura, whose writings as an Ozark journalist and farmwife were to give me a much greater respect for this complex woman. My discovery of the adult Mrs. Wilder began with a serendipitous experience at a fine downtown Nashville, Tennessee, bookstore. Rare, Foreign & More no longer exists, but in 1989 it was a major part of my life. As an earnest idler over the lunch hour, I could get in a lot of free reading and still make it back to the newsletter publisher where I worked. Lunch itself was optional. Who cares about eating when there are books to be sampled? One day in late summer, pursuing my obsession with works of biography, I chanced upon William T. Anderson’s A Little House Sampler, then recently published by the University of Nebraska Press. In the preface, I found this passage: “Many of Laura’s essays [found in the book] were published during her association with the Missouri Ruralist, years before she thought of writing the ‘Little House’ books.” Although at the moment of reading that preface I couldn’t be sure that there would be years’ worth of her columns to be found, I thought it likely. It made sense that Laura Ingalls Wilder had had some sort of apprenticeship before she launched into the major task of writing a series of books about her family. I decided almost on the spot that I wanted to learn more about this Laura of the Ozarks—known to her readers as Mrs. A. J. Wilder, as it turned out—and whether or not she would be like the person I had come to know as a Kansas schoolboy. Would the modern Laura of 1916 be...

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