WILDER, Laura Ingalls

Born 7 February 1867, Pepin County, Wisconsin; died 10 February 1957, Mansfield, Missouri

Daughter of Charles and Caroline Quiner Ingalls; married Almanzo Wilder, 1885; children: one son, one daughter

Born in a cabin in the Wisconsin woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder is perhaps America's best-known female pioneer. While her books do not follow the pattern of her early life exactly, they are very close. Her parents moved their family many times, searching for a better life for Wilder and her three sisters. After living in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Minnesota, they settled in De Smet, South Dakota, where Wilder met and married her husband. After a difficult early married life, in which one daughter was born and a baby son died, the Wilders bought a farm near Mansfield, Missouri, where they lived the rest of their lives.

At Rocky Ridge Farm, Wilder raised chickens and made butter, helped her husband build their home, and began to write articles for various rural papers and a column, "As a Farm Woman Thinks," for the Missouri Ruralist. She stopped writing for the papers in 1924, but her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a writer herself, encouraged her to write about her early life. So, in 1930 at the age of sixty-three, Wilder began to write the Little House books.

The seven autobiographical volumes published during Wild-er's lifetime cover the years from about age four to her marriage and reflect the changing point of view of the maturing heroine. Little House in the Big Woods (1932) describes life in a log cabin in the forest, as seen by a young child. This volume features stories about Pa's adventures in the woods, a jolly Christmas, and a maple sugaring dance. Little House on the Prairie (1935) takes the Ingalls family across the Mississippi into Indian lands, where they create a homestead but are forced by the government to leave. Minnesota is the scene of On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), where Laura goes to school and first encounters Nellie Oleson, a tiresome brat who appears in later books as well. The Ingalls family's life in Minnesota is dominated by the plague of grasshoppers.

By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939) takes the family to South Dakota, where they live at a railroad camp, then spend the winter in the surveyor's house so they will be on hand when the town is established. The Long Winter (1940) describes the severe winter of 1881, which the family spends in a house in De Smet. The book ends with the arrival of the train (snowbound since fall) and the celebration of Christmas in May. Little Town on the Prairie (1941) gives scenes of Laura's life as a teenager in town. At the end of the book, she is given a certificate to teach school, although she is only fifteen. The final volume, These Happy Golden Years (1943), tells of her teaching and her courtship with Almanzo Wilder; they are married at the end of the volume. One other volume of the Little House books, Farmer Boy (1933), does not deal with her own life but with her husband's boyhood on a large farm near Malone, New York.

The other three books published under her name are all posthumous. The First Four Years (1971) covers the early, difficult years of her marriage, ending with the death of her baby boy and the burning of their home. On the Way Home (1962) is a journal she kept during their trip to Missouri and the beginning of their life at Rocky Ridge Farm. West from Home (1974) is a group of letters written to her husband from San Francisco when visiting Rose there in 1915.

The only major award won by Wilder was a special award given at the Newbery-Caldecott dinner in 1954, but her Little House books are among the most popular and beloved of child-ren's classics, and have spawned many related series. The Child-ren's Library Association set up the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, of which she was the first recipient, to be given every five years. A popular television series was been based on her work, although the scripts departed a good deal from the themes and spirit of the original books, giving more emphasis to exciting and unusual events. Many of the places Wilder lived have memorials of some sort, and Rocky Ridge Farm is now a museum.

The Little House books' description of everyday life in pioneer times appeals to both children and adults. As children's fiction, their greatest achievement is the ease and grace with which Wilder speaks to children. She never patronizes, yet she retains a suitable perspective. Laura and her sisters are not glamorized; Laura is adventurous, but in contrast to children in other books about pioneer life, she performs no heroic deeds. Of course, these novels are cosmetic reality, for only a few of the harsher aspects of pioneer life are depicted, as a study of those parts of Wilder's life left out of the story reveals. No doubt the romance of pioneer life, aided by the appeal of a series, is no small part of the success of the Little House books, but the heart of Wilder's achievement is the literary artistry with which she uses a simple, declarative style and shapes her narrative around ordinary events.

Bibliography:

Alter, J., Extraordinary Women of the American West (1999). Anderson, W., Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography (1995). Anderson, W., Pioneer Girl: The Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder (1998). Bloom, H., ed., Women Writers of Children's Literature (1998). Erisman, F., Laura Ingalls Wilder (1994). Glasscock, S., Laura Ingalls Wilder: An Author's Story (1998). Hines, S. W., I Remember Laura: Laura Ingalls Wilder (1994). Miller, J. E., Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town: Where History and Literature Meet (1994). Miller, J. E., Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend (1998). Neuman, J. M., "Cowgirl, Trailblazer, American: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Ideology of New Traditionalism" (thesis, 1996). Perkins, C. N., 100 Authors Who Shaped World History (1996). Romines, A., Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (1997). Ross, L. H., To Sanctify the World: Skyscapes in the Fiction of Wilder, Guthrie, and Cather (dissertation, 1991). Scherf, J. C., The 'Wilder' Side of Laura Ingalls: The Role of Nature in the Little House Books (1992). Spaeth, J., Laura Ingalls Wilder (1987). Subramanian, J. M., Laura Ingalls Wilder: An Annotated Bibliography of Critical, Biographical, and Teaching Studies (1997). Wadsworth, G., Laura Ingalls Wilder: Storyteller of the Prairie (1997). Wallner, A., Laura Ingalls Wilder (1999). Wheeler, J. C., Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Tribute to the Young at Heart (1992). White, D. L., Laura's Friends Remember: Close Friends Recall Laura Ingalls Wilder (1992). Zochert, D., Laura (1976).

Reference works:

Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995).

Other references:

Atlantic (Feb. 1975). Children's Literature (1975, 1978). Commentary (1998). Horn Book (Sept. 1943, Dec. 1953, Oct. 1965). Legacy (1998). Lion and the Unicorn (1979-80). NYRB (Dec. 1994). NYTBR (Aug. 1998). PW (Sept. 1992). Signs (Spring 1990). Western Historical Quarterly (1999).

—BEVERLY SEATON