 Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser.
This is a thorough biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, as well as her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who edited her manuscripts and helped guide her writing career. Laura went from covered wagons as a child to taking a plane ride as famous elderly writer. Wilder maintained that her stories were true, but they were sold as novels, and in fact she took some liberties with the truth. The tone of her books is wholesome and uplifting. Her childhood and early adulthood were constant deprivation and hardship, and at least once the Ingalls family skipped town when they couldn't pay their debts. Her attitude toward Indigenous people was probably not unusual for the era, but it was grating to note that it took 20 years before she changed a passage in her book that said there were "no people" on the land, and in the same paragraph, "only Indians lived there." ("No people" was then changed to "no settlers.") I guessed right when I said the incident with Native men in her book The First Four Years didn't ring true; she claimed elsewhere that it did happen, but to someone she knew. Laura had a complicated, turbulent relationship with her daughter Rose. Rose's writing career started first, and she wrote multiple "autobiographies" of famous men (Charlie Chaplin, Henry Ford, Jack London) that she mostly made up. Rose encouraged her mother's writing, but urged her to write for adults as she would "never make any money" on children's books. Rose also took her mother's same childhood stories and published her own versions, in one case even naming the characters Charles and Caroline; Laura only found out afterward. Laura's husband, Almanzo "Manly" Wilder, is of course part of the story, but he wasn't a writer so far less is known about his interior life than about Laura or Rose. Rose had several young male proteges that she referred to as sons or grandsons. One of them wound up with the (disputed) rights to the Little House books, and made the Hollywood deal that brought us the Little House on the Prairie TV series, which ran for 9 seasons. Both Laura and Rose spoke often about the importance of rugged individualism and self-reliance. Prairie Fires notes the many times they needed help from family or others, and speculates that they tried to erase this out of shame and embarrassment. Laura's final book, published posthumously, ends with a devastating house fire when Rose was three. Rose's writing suggests that she irrationally blamed herself for the fire. Fraser speculates that this is may be why Rose had a fixation with the subject of houses. It's fitting, perhaps, that the subject of little houses is where she and her mother Laura came together. Trigger warning for infant death. 52 Book Club Challenge: Paired prompt, fiction and nonfiction about the same person. (Paired with The First Four Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder.) Booklist Queen Challenge: A biography.
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