Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Millions of Little House on the Prairie readers feel they know Laura Ingalls—the pioneer girl who suffered blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the author of the renowned autobiographical novels. However, the complete story of her life has never been recounted. Caroline Fraser, the editor of the Library of America version of the Little House series, now brilliantly fills in the blanks in Wilder's history, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and property and financial documents.

She not only tells the grown-up narrative behind the most important childhood epic of pioneer life, but she also examines Wilder's troubled relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, and sets the record straight about ghostwriting allegations that have circulated around the novels. Despite their struggles, the Little House novels are odes to the pioneer spirit, showing it as triumphant despite all circumstances. But Wilder's true life was more difficult and grittier, a narrative of unrelenting struggle, rootlessness, and poverty.

Only in her sixties, after losing nearly everything in the Great Depression, did she turn to children's books, recasting her hardscrabble childhood as a celebratory vision of homesteading—and achieving fame and fortune in the process, in one of the most remarkable rags-to-riches stories in American literature.