Prairie Fires: The Life And Times Of Laura Ingalls Wilder

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 worldBut 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were not only fictionalized but brilliantly edited a profound act of myth-making and self-transformation Now drawing on unpublished manuscripts letters diaries and land and financial records Caroline Fraser the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series masterfully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 lifeSet 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 lettersOffering 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