Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time and Culture, and: Little House Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture (review)

In these two new works by John E. Miller and Anita Clair Fellman, respectively, the authors explore the continuing fascination with Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, and contend that the collective works of these two women have had a lasting impact on American culture in ways both subtle and obvious. Even scholars, whose work does not dwell on American children's literature, will find much to glean from these titles.

In Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time and Culture, Miller compiles nine expanded essays surrounding the relationship between Wilder and Lane. Loosely threaded together by their allusions to either or both of the women, the essays explore a wide variety of issues that reflect on the nature of the works, their relationships to the geographic spaces around them, and the times in which their authors lived.

The first essay addresses the structural challenges surrounding the biographer's quest to reveal the lives of Wilder and Lane. Useful as a potential reading for graduate classes hosting future biographers, the essay clearly sets readers up for those that follow. The second essay addresses the issue of the authorship of the Little House series of books, long thought to be the work of Laura Ingalls Wilder, but now revealed to be a complex collaboration between Wilder and Lane. The third essay tackles the concept of place as Miller argues that the little houses of the books symbolize the security of the home in a way appealing to the young readers for whom the original series of books were meant.

The fourth, fifth and sixth essays explore the times in which Wilder and Lane lived, and how those are reflected in their work. In the first of these, Miller focuses on the year 1932, a pivotal year of the Great Depression, and the year in which the first Little House book arrived on store shelves. Little House in the Big Woods, he argues, was as much a product of the Depression as it was a reflection on the frontier history it was meant to present. This compelling argument needs expansion, especially in light of more recent claims about the pervasive influence of the works on American politics. Miller addresses the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner in the fifth essay, comparing and contrasting both the thesis and its criticisms with Wilder and her works, and in the sixth essay, he completes a similar comparison of Lane's lost Missouri book with the art of Thomas Hart Benton at the Missouri capital. In each case, Miller pinpoints clear relationships between the works as produced in their own times and about the times the works are meant to reflect.

Finally, Miller addresses the issue of culture in the final three essays, focusing on Wilder's apprenticeship as a farm journalist, the treatment of Native American in her books, and the conservative ideologies of Lane and Wilder as manifest through their works. This book should be read by any interested in a snapshot of the major issues addressed in Wilder scholarship.

Fellman more directly addresses conservative ideologies in her book, Little House Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture. Clearly a product of years of research and thinking about the subject, this densely packed book makes a strong case for the pervasive influence of the books' conservative ideological positioning on American politics over the latter half of the 20th century. "The reader sees both how a self-sufficient family, responsible for its own successes, manages to survive many challenging circumstances without the aid of the government and how that self-sufficiency is somehow tied to the admirable values of individual responsibility taught by the tight, cohesive, and loving family...