Laura Ingalls Wilder: American Writer on the Prairie by Sallie Ketcham (review)

The “Historical Americans” series initiated by Routledge in 2012 includes nearly a dozen volumes profiling Americans who have had an impact on the world. Among the other subjects profiled in this eclectic series are founding father Benjamin Franklin, Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton, inspirational figures Frederick Douglass and Justice Thurgood Marshall, and folk musician and activist Woody Guthrie. Laura Ingalls Wilder is the only children’s author included in the series to date. All of these volumes are intended for classroom use. As its back matter indicates, the Wilder volume is intended to introduce students to “domestic frontier life, the conflict between Native Americans and infringing white populations, and the West in public memory and imagination.”

Part I of this volume is a standard biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Readers who are familiar with works such as Donald Zochert’s Laura: The Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder (1977), John E. Miller’s Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend (1998), or Pamela Smith Hill’s Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life (2007), may find it difficult to determine what independent scholar Sallie Ketcham contributes that is new and noteworthy. Drawing from materials held by the Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota Historical Societies as well as the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, particularly Wilder’s original manuscript, “Pioneer Girl,” this volume soon may be overshadowed by Smith Hill’s publication of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (2014). However, for students, Ketcham’s references to the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript and other unpublished resources will augment and contextualize the details she has amassed about the Ingalls family. Although Laura is particularly featured, her parents and siblings have not been neglected. For instance, Ketcham provides information about the illness that resulted in Mary Ingalls’s loss of vision (some of it drawn from scholarship published as recently as 2013) and additional context regarding the College for the Blind that Mary attended in Vinton, Iowa. Throughout the volume, Ketcham helpfully endeavors to distinguish the Ingalls’ actual experiences from the way they have been characterized in Wilder’s fiction.

Part II of the volume includes a sampling of documents that represent the careers of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. Among them are the portion of “Pioneer Girl” that corresponds to The Long Winter, Lane’s autobiographical sketch for publication in the Saturday Evening Post in 1934, samples of Wilder’s columns from the Missouri Ruralist, a letter from Wilder to her husband while she was visiting Lane in San Francisco in 1915 during the Pan-American Exhibition, and sample children’s fan letters to Wilder. Little information is provided to justify the inclusion of these particular resources, and most of them will be familiar to academic readers who have encountered works such as Wilder’s West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder to Almanzo Wilder, San Francisco, 1915 (1974), William T. Anderson’s A Little House Sampler (1988), and Stephen W. Hines’s Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writing from the Ozarks (2007). Audiences unfamiliar with these resources nonetheless would benefit from greater annotation and analysis throughout the section. For example, what does Ketcham see in the three letters from child fans included here that is especially representative of or significant about Little House fandom?

The author demonstrates genuine enthusiasm for her subject and appears eager to defend Wilder and her works against a range of criticisms, even when she does not identify the sources for those criticisms. Describing Charles Ingalls, she alludes purposefully to his “intense blue eyes, eyes that dominate every surviving photograph of Charles’s handsome narrow face—his whisk-broom beard and untamed hair notwithstanding” (8); academic audiences may recall Dennis J. McAuliffe’s “Little House on the Osage Prairie,” with its scathing references to Charles Ingalls’s serial-killer-like appearance, even though McAuliffe’s name is not mentioned in the volume. Elsewhere, Ketcham addresses the criticism that Wilder’s description of Pa playing his...