Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

I was completely absorbed by this “biography of a book,” the story of how the Little House series came to be, in a matrix of complex historical and personal circumstances that also illumine a great deal in the history and biography of America.

Rose Wilder Lane was clearly a disturbed person. However, without her I do not think this great work of American literature would ever have come to be, so we owe her a certain measure of gratitude. And it's sad that her own talent was overshadowed by her mental and psychological handicaps, which at the time went unrecognized and untreated, and funneled into her Libertarian obsessions.

Unexpectedly this book helped me to understand the roots of the increasing intransigence of conservatives in the perhaps necessary, but insensitive and short-sighted treatment of agricultural overproduction during the New Deal, which created an alienation and divisiveness that has only gotten worse.

Grim.

The lives of small-time farmers that were venerated in the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder contain a bitter truth: there is no way to make a living on the prairie without government aid (rarely forthcoming) or tens of thousands of dollars already in your bank account. And the dark secret of the “Little House” series is that the Ingalls family did not make it. Charles and Caroline repeatedly took chances with their money, their labor, and the safety of their children, and none of those chances paid off; they never did make it as farmers on the prairie. Once Laura marries and has started a life of her own there is hope that circumstances will ease, but she has quite the daddy complex and marries a man just like Charles: one determined to be a farmer in a part of the country that is too arid to sustain crops, and one who is a spendthrift to boot. Life is grim and stays that way, and eventually a daughter named Rose grows up to cause a whole host of problems.

For readers who grew up on the “Little House” books (as I did) this book is scandalous and fascinating and touching and grim. The author is thorough and precise in the details, and gives much-needed context to a life that we all thought we knew. A must-read.

Merged review:

Grim.

The lives of small-time farmers that were venerated in the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder contain a bitter truth: there is no way to make a living on the prairie without government aid (rarely forthcoming) or tens of thousands of dollars already in your bank account. And the dark secret of the “Little House” series is that the Ingalls family did not make it. Charles and Caroline repeatedly took chances with their money, their labor, and the safety of their children, and none of those chances paid off; they never did make it as farmers on the prairie. Once Laura marries and has started a life of her own there is hope that circumstances will ease, but she has quite the daddy complex and marries a man just like Charles: one determined to be a farmer in a part of the country that is too arid to sustain crops, and one who is a spendthrift to boot. Life is grim and stays that way, and eventually a daughter named Rose grows up to cause a whole host of problems.

For readers who grew up on the “Little House” books (as I did) this book is scandalous and fascinating and touching and grim. The author is thorough and precise in the details, and gives much-needed context to a life that we all thought we knew. A must-read.

This is an excellent version of what it is and I enjoyed it a lot! Extremely interesting and I think required reading for fans of the Little House books. I loved them as a kid but they desperately need the context this book provides. I do wish the parts about Laura's youth had been expanded and the parts about her later years condensed somewhat.

Well, that was a wild ride.

I have always admired Laura Ingalls Wilder, since I was a little girl reading her historic fiction book series. Caroline Fraser does a fantastic job with this in-depth look at not only Laura, but also her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. Caroline goes into depth on the history that helped set the stage for Laura's life, and the history that helped set the stage for the whys and hows of Laura/Rose fictionalizing Laura's childhood.

The 1910s and 1920s were a bit of a slog to get through, but the rest of the book was great. If you only care about Laura, stop reading after Chapter 6 (the first chapter in part 2). Parts 2 & 3 have a lot to do with Rose Wilder Lane's mental health (she clearly struggled with at least bipolar disorder), and Rose's relationship to Laura. Rose was not a likeable person, which I found astonishing, given the lessons we know Laura took from Ma. In hindsight, perhaps this isn't terribly surprising, given that Laura likely had her hands full helping Almanzo keep up with the farm. Laura likely didn't have the energy/time to parent her young child, which could also explain all of the bitterness and resentment Rose felt towards her parents throughout her 81 years on this earth. 

Another review by aneidas mentions:

 It's interesting that Fraser seems to condemn Lane for her extreme political views but somewhat exonerates Wilder, who shared her daughter's libertarian beliefs... similar to the way Wilder excuses her father for his own poor decisions in her books. 

Aw yeah this is my JAM! I grew up loving the Little House books but as an adult I have come to realize that they are #problematicfaves and yet...still compelling. This book digs up a lot of details about how Laura Ingalls Wilder's childhood was even MORE intense and also even MORE problematic than it's depicted in the books. But where things REALLY go off the rails is with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. I've read a fair amount of other books/articles about Laura Ingalls Wilder so I was definitely aware that Rose had helped her mother edit the books, and also that she was a libertarian and had influenced the stories to make the pioneers seem more self-reliant and less desperately in need of government handouts (which they definitely 500% needed) but like, omg, what a bonkers woman. (And it seems like, though Fraser correctly doesn't speculate on a diagnosis, that she was suffering from some untreated mental illness?) The whole time I was reading this I kept yelling aloud at my roommate new outrageous things Rose Wilder Lane did.

Highly recommended for adult Little House fans!

I was a serious Little House fan as a kid, rereading the books regularly, and I've read other bios of Wilder, but I learned things I never knew and made connections to American history that fill in the blanks left by Wilder's fictionalization of her life.

Rose and Laura's anti-New Deal fanaticism was especially fascinating and outrageously hypocritical. A family whose livelihood came from free land stolen from indigenous people by the US government has a lot of nerve to criticize desperate people seeking relief during the depression. The connection of the Dust Bowl back to the destructive farming practices of homesteaders ads another layer of hypocrisy on to their obsessive opposition to collective social solutions to public crises.

Also, Rose was quite a piece of work, more than other bios have ever let on.

I LOVED the first 2/3rds and the very end of this book. The “Little House” books were incredibly important to my childhood. Each time I visited my grandmother I was able to go purchase a new Little House book, and I must have read them through at least 3 times. I then had the privilege of reading them three more times when I had children, sharing Laura and Mary and Ma and Pa's world with my children. Thus, reading this biography of the author was of course interesting to me, and it was very well-written. The last third did drag for me, though, with a lot of emphasis on Laura's daughter, Rose, who comes off as someone who really needed some therapy, but never received it. As much as I disliked her, though, I have to admit that without Rose becoming a writer, and encouraging her mother, it's unlikely Laura would have ended up writing her family's story so, for that, I'm grateful. In any event, if you enjoyed the books or just want to read a well-done biography of a kick-ass woman, I recommend Prairie Fires!