Book: Prarie Fires

 Book: Prarie Fires

Author: Caroline Fraser

Pages: 656

This is my 202nd book for the year

What Amazon Says:

Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls - the pioneer girl who srvived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books.  But the true saga of her life has never been fully told.  Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser - the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series -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.  Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder's turmultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books.  The Little House books for all the hardships they describe, are paeans to the pioneer spirit, portraying it as triumphant against all odds.  But Wilder's real life was harder and grittier than that, a story of relentless struggle, rootlessness, and poverty.  It was only in her sisties, after losing nearly everything in the GreatDepression, that she turned 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 astonishing rages to riches episodes in American letters.  Spanning nearly a centry of epochal change, from the Indian Wars to the Dust Bowl, Wild'ers dramatic life provides a unique perspective on American history and our national mytbology of self-reliance.  

This was an excellent book.  I grew up watching Little House on the Prairie reruns, and reading the books, so I was intrigued when I found this book at our local used bookstore.  It is well written, and delves into not only Laura's life, but the life of her parents and even a bit of her siblings.  Her life was very hard from the beginning, and I had no idea that she and her family moved around so much or that she went years and years without seeing her family due to that distance.  Great book - if you like the Little House stories, you should check this out.

Stars: 5