Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Fascinating and extremely detailed. Will use some of this for class. But I had to skim because there was more than I would ever retain.

This is an excellent version of what it is and I enjoyed it a lot! Extremely interesting and I think required reading for fans of the Little House books. I loved them as a kid but they desperately need the context this book provides. I do wish the parts about Laura's youth had been expanded and the parts about her later years condensed somewhat.

Grim.

The lives of small-time farmers that were venerated in the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder contain a bitter truth: there is no way to make a living on the prairie without government aid (rarely forthcoming) or tens of thousands of dollars already in your bank account. And the dark secret of the “Little House” series is that the Ingalls family did not make it. Charles and Caroline repeatedly took chances with their money, their labor, and the safety of their children, and none of those chances paid off; they never did make it as farmers on the prairie. Once Laura marries and has started a life of her own there is hope that circumstances will ease, but she has quite the daddy complex and marries a man just like Charles: one determined to be a farmer in a part of the country that is too arid to sustain crops, and one who is a spendthrift to boot. Life is grim and stays that way, and eventually a daughter named Rose grows up to cause a whole host of problems.

For readers who grew up on the “Little House” books (as I did) this book is scandalous and fascinating and touching and grim. The author is thorough and precise in the details, and gives much-needed context to a life that we all thought we knew. A must-read.

Merged review:

Grim.

The lives of small-time farmers that were venerated in the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder contain a bitter truth: there is no way to make a living on the prairie without government aid (rarely forthcoming) or tens of thousands of dollars already in your bank account. And the dark secret of the “Little House” series is that the Ingalls family did not make it. Charles and Caroline repeatedly took chances with their money, their labor, and the safety of their children, and none of those chances paid off; they never did make it as farmers on the prairie. Once Laura marries and has started a life of her own there is hope that circumstances will ease, but she has quite the daddy complex and marries a man just like Charles: one determined to be a farmer in a part of the country that is too arid to sustain crops, and one who is a spendthrift to boot. Life is grim and stays that way, and eventually a daughter named Rose grows up to cause a whole host of problems.

For readers who grew up on the “Little House” books (as I did) this book is scandalous and fascinating and touching and grim. The author is thorough and precise in the details, and gives much-needed context to a life that we all thought we knew. A must-read.

Well researched biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter. No punches are pulled on this one - it's a warts and all tale - but found the background on the story that inspired the books I enjoyed as a child really interesting. Am now interested in rereading the Little House series.

Well, that was a wild ride.

I have always admired Laura Ingalls Wilder, since I was a little girl reading her historic fiction book series. Caroline Fraser does a fantastic job with this in-depth look at not only Laura, but also her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. Caroline goes into depth on the history that helped set the stage for Laura's life, and the history that helped set the stage for the whys and hows of Laura/Rose fictionalizing Laura's childhood.

The 1910s and 1920s were a bit of a slog to get through, but the rest of the book was great. If you only care about Laura, stop reading after Chapter 6 (the first chapter in part 2). Parts 2 & 3 have a lot to do with Rose Wilder Lane's mental health (she clearly struggled with at least bipolar disorder), and Rose's relationship to Laura. Rose was not a likeable person, which I found astonishing, given the lessons we know Laura took from Ma. In hindsight, perhaps this isn't terribly surprising, given that Laura likely had her hands full helping Almanzo keep up with the farm. Laura likely didn't have the energy/time to parent her young child, which could also explain all of the bitterness and resentment Rose felt towards her parents throughout her 81 years on this earth. 

Another review by aneidas mentions:

 It's interesting that Fraser seems to condemn Lane for her extreme political views but somewhat exonerates Wilder, who shared her daughter's libertarian beliefs... similar to the way Wilder excuses her father for his own poor decisions in her books. 

I was completely absorbed by this “biography of a book,” the story of how the Little House series came to be, in a matrix of complex historical and personal circumstances that also illumine a great deal in the history and biography of America.

Rose Wilder Lane was clearly a disturbed person. However, without her I do not think this great work of American literature would ever have come to be, so we owe her a certain measure of gratitude. And it's sad that her own talent was overshadowed by her mental and psychological handicaps, which at the time went unrecognized and untreated, and funneled into her Libertarian obsessions.

Unexpectedly this book helped me to understand the roots of the increasing intransigence of conservatives in the perhaps necessary, but insensitive and short-sighted treatment of agricultural overproduction during the New Deal, which created an alienation and divisiveness that has only gotten worse.

This was a very interesting tale of the truth about Laura Ingalls Wilder. Not just the children's storybook we read as a child, but the story of the woman. It begins with the story of her parents, and ends after her death, with more stories about her daughter (Rose Wilder Lane). I'm sure it's biased to the author's belief of how events unfolded. It didn't shine a good light on Rose. But I learned a lot about how we stole land from the Native Americans. I would recommend this to everyone, especially anyone who has read and loved the “Little House” books.

I was a serious Little House fan as a kid, rereading the books regularly, and I've read other bios of Wilder, but I learned things I never knew and made connections to American history that fill in the blanks left by Wilder's fictionalization of her life.

Rose and Laura's anti-New Deal fanaticism was especially fascinating and outrageously hypocritical. A family whose livelihood came from free land stolen from indigenous people by the US government has a lot of nerve to criticize desperate people seeking relief during the depression. The connection of the Dust Bowl back to the destructive farming practices of homesteaders ads another layer of hypocrisy on to their obsessive opposition to collective social solutions to public crises.

Also, Rose was quite a piece of work, more than other bios have ever let on.

I LOVED the first 2/3rds and the very end of this book. The “Little House” books were incredibly important to my childhood. Each time I visited my grandmother I was able to go purchase a new Little House book, and I must have read them through at least 3 times. I then had the privilege of reading them three more times when I had children, sharing Laura and Mary and Ma and Pa's world with my children. Thus, reading this biography of the author was of course interesting to me, and it was very well-written. The last third did drag for me, though, with a lot of emphasis on Laura's daughter, Rose, who comes off as someone who really needed some therapy, but never received it. As much as I disliked her, though, I have to admit that without Rose becoming a writer, and encouraging her mother, it's unlikely Laura would have ended up writing her family's story so, for that, I'm grateful. In any event, if you enjoyed the books or just want to read a well-done biography of a kick-ass woman, I recommend Prairie Fires!

Aw yeah this is my JAM! I grew up loving the Little House books but as an adult I have come to realize that they are #problematicfaves and yet...still compelling. This book digs up a lot of details about how Laura Ingalls Wilder's childhood was even MORE intense and also even MORE problematic than it's depicted in the books. But where things REALLY go off the rails is with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. I've read a fair amount of other books/articles about Laura Ingalls Wilder so I was definitely aware that Rose had helped her mother edit the books, and also that she was a libertarian and had influenced the stories to make the pioneers seem more self-reliant and less desperately in need of government handouts (which they definitely 500% needed) but like, omg, what a bonkers woman. (And it seems like, though Fraser correctly doesn't speculate on a diagnosis, that she was suffering from some untreated mental illness?) The whole time I was reading this I kept yelling aloud at my roommate new outrageous things Rose Wilder Lane did.

Highly recommended for adult Little House fans!

Warning: do not read if you want to keep your illusions about Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House Books.

Caroline Fraser has written an extremely comprehensive portrait of Laura and Rose's lives from birth to death, and set them in a historical context so that we can more easily understand the factors that determined their fates and the choices they made. It's a long book but it reads quickly, especially the first part (Laura's early life) and third part (how the Little House books came into existence).

Most of us know by now that not everything in the books was true, or rather that the books didn't tell the whole story. Most of us also knew that LIW got a lot of editorial assistance from her daughter Rose. But did you know that Rose was either a manic-depressive or borderline personality, fan (and rival) of Ayn Rand, and anti-Semitic to boot? The twisted relationship between mother and daughter was fascinating and horrifying, and although LIW comes across as a nice conservative lady who wanted everyone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, I wouldn't have wanted to dig too far into her psyche to get her views on Jews, blacks, and other minorities.

Thank goodness there are no long hidden secrets about Laura and Almanzo's marriage - she really loved him and was very attached to him, despite her fiery temper and his occasional financial missteps.

I will never look at the books in the same way again, but I will still read them with great fondness and affection. They were such an important part of my childhood and ultimately I think I can separate them from both author and history, and just enjoy them for the great stories that they are.