Little house on the Prairie

Virginia L. Wolf

Speaking at a book fair in 1937, the beloved children's writer Laura Ingalls Wilder remarked, "I realized that I had seen and lived it all - all the successive phases of the frontier.... Then I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history." To preserve that history for children, Wilder created the Little House series of books, an eight-volume undertaking she began at age sixty-two. These autobiographical novels are about growing up on the American frontier in the middle 1800s; they center on the character Laura and her parents - Pa and Ma - and treat of home, farm, family, land, and community. Classics of children's literature, the Little House books originally received five nominations as Newbery Honor Books; were reissued in editions illustrated by Garth Williams in the early 1950s; and formed the basis for the popular television series Little House on the Prairie in 1974. . The third novel in the series, Little House on the Prairie (1935), takes place in the Indian Territory of Kansas. In this book Laura becomes a frontier girl; and throughout the twenty-six chapters the focus is on the land: the prairie as it was experienced by those who homesteaded there. In this novel, as in the other books in the series, Wilder weaves a tapestry of joy and serenity, acknowledging the realities of pain and loss but allowing the values of the Ingalls family - caring and peace - to predominate over adversity. In Little House on the Prairie: A Reader's Companion, the scholar Virginia L. Wolf presents a multifaceted perspective on the novel, the series, and Wilder's place in children's literature. Arguing that the myth of the American frontier lies in the seemingly contradictory notion that the wilderness is to be at once conquered and revered, Wolf offers a probing inquiry into the many contexts in which Wilder's achievements can be understood. Here readers will find discussions of the ambivalence and ambiguity central to both novel and myth; comparisons with the television show and with the other books in the series; insights into the complex relationship between Wilder and her daughter, who not only edited the novels but also drew on them in her own writing; and analysis of the critical reactions to Little House on the Prairie. Of special interest are the chapter suggesting ways to teach students to read the novel and the selected bibliography outlining primary, secondary, and biographical sources.