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Reviewed by:
  • Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser, and: Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books by Christine Woodside, and: The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Frontier Landscapes That Inspired the Little House Books by Marta McDowell
  • Elif S. Armbruster
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. By Caroline Fraser. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017. xiv + 625 pp. $35 hardcover.
Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books. By Christine Woodside. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2016. ix + 259 pp. $25.99 hardcover.
The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Frontier Landscapes That Inspired the Little House Books. By Marta McDowell. Portland: Timber Press, 2017. 396 pp. $27.95 hardcover.

There is no question about the wide and lasting popular appeal of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her series of Little House books; what remains less certain is her work's scholarly value. While Wilder's books have continued to entice readers since the first volume in the eight-part series was published in 1932, critical attention has until recently been relatively scant. The three books reviewed here work to establish Wilder's scholarly importance, particularly for those interested in women's literature, young adult fiction, literary politics, and horticultural studies.

Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, Caroline Fraser's Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder offers a plenitude of details overlooked in previous biographies, such as the numerous marriages between the Ingalls and Quiner families and the financial devastation, loneliness, and death that plagued frontier families like the Wilders. It also provides a long overdue and much-needed contextual history of Indigenous people in the regions west of the Mississippi from before Wilder was born to after her death. With nearly one hundred pages of primary source endnotes that document Fraser's extensive archival work, Prairie Fires is the most comprehensive and authoritative biography of Wilder.

The book is divided into three parts, each devoted to a particular theme that pioneer families faced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Fraser digs as deeply as she can into the origins of the Ingalls family in the first part of the book, she acknowledges the difficulty of reconstructing the stories of families steeped in poverty and thus largely absent from the historical record. She also delves into Wilder's childhood, her early married life, and the birth of her daughter, concluding this section with the family's decision to move to Missouri in 1894. The book's second section focuses on Rose Wilder Lane, whom Fraser paints as a complicated woman who thrived on unpredictability and tumult. Perhaps this section's most significant part for Wilder scholars [End Page 176] is Fraser's attempt to tease fact from fiction in Lane's notoriously duplicitous versions of her mother's history. Once Lane began editing Laura's "private outpouring" of notes (315), the writing grew even more embellished and idealized, particularly with the stock market crash of 1929. Indeed, Fraser points out that the pair (mostly Lane) specifically emphasized the house in the title of the first book in the series—Little House in the Big Woods, published in 1932—in order to comfort readers "at a cheerless moment in the nation's history" (334). Even with the books' success, Fraser notes, Wilder and Lane were consumed in "fires [of] abandonment, blame, and disappointment" (345). She exposes the "fires"—literal and figurative—that continued to burn both Wilder and Lane until the end of their lives, touching upon Lane's evolving fascist political views and Wilder's increasing attachment to her home. As Fraser paints it, the aging Wilder was "done with" portraying the American "tale of progress" (440), but Lane knew there was still much promise in her mother's story, which she continued to tap after her mother's death.

Christine Woodside's Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books, published in 2016, picks up chronologically where Fraser's work concludes. Woodside's...

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