Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser (review)

Weighing in at 515 pages of text and eighty-six pages of notes, Caroline Fraser’s Pulitzer Prizewinning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder is large physically and large in its ambitions. Benefitting from a successful rollout of favorable reviews and media interviews, the book has garnered numerous awards and plaudits and rightfully so. Fraser’s industrious research shines through in her footnotes and in the increased detail she is able to furnish on a number of issues and topics surrounding Wilder’s life and writings. Her felicitous writing style keeps the pages turning and readers asking for more. She is riding a wave of recent interest in the subject, especially the 2014 release of Wilder’s previously unpublished autobiographical manuscript, “Pioneer Girl,” which served as a resource for her and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, when they collaborated in producing the Little House novels of children’s literature fame.

Fraser, like other writers before her, understands that any biography of Wilder must necessarily be a dual study of mother and daughter, who were tethered together by family circumstance and authorial ambition. Some readers and commentators have balked at the frequently critical take Fraser presents on Lane, but, for the most part, her treatment of the mercurial short-story writer, essayist, novelist, and eventually political theorist rings true to my way of thinking. Much more difficult to assess, because the traces she left behind were relatively meager, is the life of her mother, who turned out to become one of American’s most beloved children’s novelists. Lacking evidence on Wilder’s life at a number of points, Fraser does not hesitate to speculate, and in many cases her guesses and musings are plausible and suggestive. Instances of this include comments on her father’s avoidance of military service during the Civil War, the possibility that her sister Mary’s blindness helped Laura develop an unsentimental voice, and so forth. In other cases, her conjectures are less convincing. Trying to read too much into family photographs, for instance, can be an interesting exercise, but also a hazardous one.

Too often, Fraser implies that she is breaking new ground in addressing questions, such as the comparative contributions each woman made to the writing of the books, something that has been hashed and rehashed numerous times. Some reviewers seem to have been overly influenced by advertising for the book suggesting that previous researchers had not already addressed or settled a number of questions. More serious, however, is Fraser’s effort to establish two major points, which constitute her overarching claims for novelty in approaching her subject. This is not to detract from the generally effective and persuasive presentation she makes generally throughout the book, but it appears that in seeking to present a bold new thesis or theses, Fraser has been too ready to venture beyond the evidence. Her contention that Wilder’s childhood was horrible and that her memories of it were hellish is contradicted by the author’s highly positive statements about her growing-up years when she took the opportunity to talk about it and by the fact that life on the midwestern frontier during the late 1800s was generally challenging and hazardous. In asking how good or bad Wilder’s life was within her childhood environment, one is compelled to ask, “Compared to what?” A more troubling contention is that the family’s moving out into eastern Dakota Territory—the locus of half of the novels—was “one of the biggest boondoggles of them all” and that the area should never have been settled by agriculturalists. Evidence presented for this assertion is thin and strained and unlikely to convince many objective inquirers.

Nevertheless, Prairie Fires is a welcome addition to the Wilder library, deepens our understanding of Wilder, Lane, and their times, will be bound to provoke continuing discussion, and takes its place as an essential read for anyone interested in the subject.