'Just as gripping as the original novels . . . As pacy and vivid as
one of Wilder's own narratives' Sunday Times Millions of readers of
Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls - the
pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the
Great Plains where 'as far as a man could go to the north in a day,
or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods. There
were no houses'. Her books are beloved around the world. But the
true story of her life has never been fully told. The Little House
books were not only fictionalized but brilliantly edited, a
profound act of myth-making and self-transformation. Now, drawing
on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and
financial records, Caroline Fraser, the editor of the Library of
America edition of the Little House series, masterfully fills in
the gaps in Wilder's biography, setting the record straight
regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the
books and uncovering the grown-up story behind the most influential
childhood epic of pioneer life. Set against nearly a century of
epochal change, from the Homestead Act and the Indian Wars to the
Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, Wilder's dramatic life provides
a unique perspective on American history and our national mythology
of self-reliance. Settling on the frontier amidst land-rush
speculation, Wilder's family encountered Biblical tribulations of
locusts and drought, fire and ruin. Deep in debt after a series of
personal tragedies, including the loss of a child and her husband's
stroke, Wilder uprooted herself again, crisscrossing the country
and turning to menial work to support her family. In middle age,
she began writing a farm advice column, prodded by her self-taught
journalist daughter. And at the age of sixty, after losing nearly
everything in the Depression, she turned to children's books,
recasting her hardscrabble childhood as a triumphal vision of
homesteading - and achieving fame and fortune in the process, in
one of the most astonishing rags-to-riches stories in American
letters. Offering fresh insight and new discoveries about Wilder's
life and times, Prairie Fires reveals the complex woman who defined
the American pioneer character, and whose artful blend of fact and
fiction grips us to this day.
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