Wilder, Laura Ingalls (1867–1957)

American author of the "Little House" books, a series of award-winning children's novels based on her own late 19th-century frontier childhood . Name variations: Bess or Bessie. Born Laura Elizabeth Ingalls on February 7, 1867, in Pepin, Wisconsin; died at Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri, on February 10, 1957; daughter of Charles Philip Ingalls (a frontiersman, farmer, and carpenter) and Caroline Quiner Ingalls (a teacher); attended public schools until just short of high school graduation; married Almanzo James Wilder (a farmer), in 1885; children: Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968, a writer); and one son who died shortly after birth.

Awards:

six Newbery Honor Awards; first recipient (1954) of Laura Ingalls Wilder Award created by the American Library Association; many children's and public libraries named after her.

Traveled with her family from one place to another in search of a potentially profitable farm (1868–79); family ultimately settled in De Smet, (South) Dakota, where she met and married Almanzo Wilder with whom she moved (1894) to a farm outside Mansfield, Missouri, in the Ozarks where she lived until her death; wrote for The Missouri Ruralist (1911–24); served as secretary-treasurer of Mansfield Farm Loan Association (1919–27); from a 1930 autobiographical manuscript, "Pioneer Girl," elaborated the stories that would become the seven "Little House" books published in her lifetime; also wrote a book about the childhood of Almanzo Wilder.

Selected writings:

Little House in the Big Woods (1932); Farmer Boy (1933); Little House on the Prairie (1935); On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937); By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939); The Long Winter (1940); Little Town on the Prairie (1941); These Happy Golden Years (1943); (with Rose Wilder Lane) On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri in 1894 (1962); The First Four Years (1971); West From Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder to Almanzo Wilder—San Francisco 1915 (1974).

Laura Ingalls Wilder's autobiographical children's novels, known as the "Little House" books, first began appearing in print in the early 1930s, but the series remains embedded in American life and is important to people all over the

world. Tens of thousands of American school-children use the books in their classrooms to learn about pioneer life, or read and reread the books on their own. During the summer, countless tourists from the United States and other countries make pilgrimages to the sites of the homes where Laura Ingalls Wilder once lived. A manufacturer of collectible dolls, advertising in a national Sunday newspaper supplement, introduced the "Laura" doll as the first in a collection inspired by the books. Early in his presidency, Ronald Reagan indicated that the program based on the "Little House" books was his favorite television show. A well-known Japanese writer and director of television and film fled the materialism of Tokyo, taking with him five "Little House" books as his guides to a back-to-nature philosophy. A wire service report suggesting that Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane , essentially was the ghostwriter of the books, provoked articles and columns in newspapers across the country and appeared as far away as the South China Morning Post.

I realized that I had seen and lived … all the successive phases of the frontier…. I wanted the children now to understand more about the beginnings of things … what it is that made America as they know it.

—Laura Ingalls Wilder

The life which formed the basis of these beloved books has come to be seen as especially expressive of the American pioneer experience. Yet that life was more complex than suggested by the widely known version of Wilder as a 65-year-old farm woman who sat down with a pencil and school tablet to tell with instinctive artistry the compelling story of her courageous 19th-century pioneer family. In fact, Wilder had been a columnist for a Missouri farm periodical for years, and in the chronicling of her childhood she had the active collaboration of her writer daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Furthermore, the meaning of the pioneer life they related remains ambiguous: does one marvel at the Ingalls family's persistence or dwell on the reasons for their defeats?

Laura Ingalls was born in 1867 on a farm in Pepin, Wisconsin, not far from the Mississippi River. Both her mother's and father's families had migrated in stages from the East in search of fertile farmland. The goal of her parents, Charles and Caroline Ingalls , like that of most of the members of their families and of many other Americans at that time, was to establish themselves on affordable, fertile, easy-to-cultivate land so as to make a dependable living as farmers. During Laura's childhood, however, her parents ran afoul of virtually every setback experienced by those who sought to make their living from the land.

Their departure from Wisconsin in 1868 started the Ingalls family on an 11-year migration, zigzagging back and forth across the Midwest and the Great Plains in search of a piece of land that would grant them a living. It was from these efforts that the adult Laura would create the famous saga of her childhood. Their journeys took them to the treeless, open prairies of Montgomery County, Kansas, for almost three years (1868–71), then back to Pepin, Wisconsin, for about the same length of time (1871–74) before they headed across the Mississippi River once again for the prairies of western Minnesota. Their five-year stay (1874–79) in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, was broken in the middle by a year (1876–77) spent helping to run a hotel in Burr Grove, Iowa, and was further divided by an initial wheat farming venture (1874–76) and a later period (1877–79) of living and working in town.

Laura might have grown up in Walnut Grove were it not for the extension of the railroad into Dakota Territory and the availability of free land there under the terms of the 1862 Homestead Act. Through family contacts, Charles Ingalls obtained a white-collar job working for the railroad as it inched its way west. This job enabled him to pay off the debts accumulated during the difficult 1870s and to be in position to stake a homestead claim on Dakota land. At Caroline Ingalls' insistence, their homestead near De Smet, in what would become South Dakota in 1889, was as far west as the family, now including four daughters, ventured. It was in De Smet that Laura Ingalls grew to adulthood and married another homesteader, Almanzo ("Manly") Wilder.

Wilder's account of her childhood in the "Little House" books is wonderfully specific in its details of domestic and farm skills. It is a superb, if discreet, record of the socialization of a 19th-century roughneck into a young woman and capable partner for a farmer husband. Her depiction of the close, warm Ingalls family life is compelling, although sentimentalized. Her chronicle of the disasters faced by her family reflects the experiences of many other settlers as well: danger from panthers, bears, and wolves; frustration over government Indian policy and homesteading provisions; crop-destroying grasshoppers, blackbirds, and drought; prairie fires and endless blizzards.

There are other ways in which the books do not accurately reflect the Ingallses' experiences; Wilder altered the chronology of events somewhat, accentuated the family's isolation, and deemphasized their dependence on wage work and their indebtedness for many of the years she chronicles. In her desire to portray the essential westward, pioneering movement of the family, she ignored the number of times they "backtrailed" (returned east), even to places they had once abandoned. Writing of her family's experiences 50 years after they occurred, Wilder stressed their hard work, persistence, ingenuity, and satisfaction in the face of all these challenges and downplayed the marginality of their existence on each farm, determinedly giving their lives as pioneers an optimistic tone. The original series of books, however, carries the family no further than Laura's marriage in 1885, two years before her parents abandoned for good their efforts to farm and moved to town.

Her husband Manly's prospects seemed better than her father's because he had more land and equipment and fewer people for whom he was responsible. Nonetheless, if Laura (whom Manly called Bessie) thought that in marriage she was escaping the chronic financial woes of her own family, she was wrong; Manly and Laura also failed at farming in De Smet, done in by personal tragedies and by hailstorms that destroyed their wheat, by drought that seemed to be the norm in South Dakota, and by the destruction of their farmhouse by fire.

These bleak happenings are all recounted in The First Four Years, a manuscript never published in Laura's lifetime. Even that book, however, ends on a note of optimism, although in reality the Wilders gave up on wheat farming on homestead land in South Dakota. In 1890, Laura, Manly, and their three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Rose began their own period of backtrailing, spending two years away, first in Minnesota and then in Florida. By August 1892, they had returned to De Smet to do wage work, saving money and pondering what to do next and where.

Eventually, the Wilders decided to go to the Ozark Mountains in southern Missouri, where the climate would be healthier and the land relatively cheap. They headed for the small town of

Mansfield where they put a down payment on a farm—which they aptly named Rocky Ridge—that with years of hard labor would support orchards, livestock and poultry, and grain growing. In some respects, their experience was a reprise of Laura's childhood: starting from scratch with a farm that had to be cleared of stones and trees, enduring years of interminable physical labor, and moving into town for long periods to earn needed cash to develop the farm. The chronic anxiety about finances that had been a motif in her childhood and in her early married life followed her to Mansfield, where they arrived poor and without status and remained so for years.

Eventually, Wilder's accomplishments as a poultry raiser (a common task for farm wives) made her known throughout the Ozarks and attracted the attention of the editor of The Missouri Ruralist who asked her to submit articles for the farm weekly. Her first article, appearing in 1911, was soon followed by a wide range of writings for the periodical, and ultimately by her own column. She also sold occasional articles on farm life to regional newspapers. Such writing made only a small contribution to the finances of Rocky Ridge Farm which never provided the Wilders with the financial security that Laura especially craved. Even her paid job from 1919 to 1927 as secretary-treasurer of the Mansfield Farm Loan Association did not suffice to supplement inadequate income from their farm.

Fortunately for Wilder, her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who had early left home to follow a variety of jobs all over the country, moved into journalism in 1915, becoming a very proficient and well-known writer who branched into fiction as well. Lane urged her mother to target broader markets for her writing so as to increase her earnings. From the 1910s, she helped Wilder with her writing and with ideas for articles. With Lane's editorial help and contacts, Wilder published three articles in national magazines by the mid-1920s. However, it was not until Lane had returned from several extended periods of living overseas and was ensconced for an eight-year interval at Rocky Ridge Farm, and the Wilders had retired from active farming, that Laura sat down in 1930 to write her autobiography.

Although Lane edited and typed "Pioneer Girl" for her mother, and sent it to her own literary agent, there were no takers for the first-person, adult-level narrative. However, a portion of the manuscript, dealing with the Wisconsin years, that Lane had separated out, conceiving of it as a children's book and titling it "When Grandma Was a Little Girl," did attract the interest of an editor who wished to see it expanded to 25,000 words. Wilder's task was to elaborate upon the original terse narrative, adding plenty of authentic detail about pioneer life. Lane's active role in conceptualizing and polishing the book that would be published in 1932 as Little House in the Big Woods exemplified her involvement with the series as a whole.

Wilder's special gifts were the creation of evocative word pictures and the telling of stories, skills probably enhanced by the five years when she served as her blind sister Mary Ingalls ' eyes on the world and by an entire childhood spent listening to her father's storytelling. It took her a long time to realize that these talents did not result automatically in polished compositions. Lane's crucial role in seeing the overall theme of each book and making each chapter fit that theme caused considerable tension between mother and daughter as they worked on the books together throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s when the eighth book was published.

Even before the first book was in print, Wilder began planning at least two more. The success, both popular and critical, of Little House in the Big Woods assured that she would carry on her project. Eventually readers' enthusiasm induced her to plan a whole series of novels covering her entire childhood.

As Lane worked with her on the stories, juggling her own writing with time spent on her mother's manuscripts, the two women began to believe that their family's experiences had political significance. As they recalled the struggles endured by the Ingallses and later by the Wilders, they became incensed by government farm-relief programs that implied that individuals could not cope with setbacks on their own. A lifelong Democrat, Wilder, like Lane, came to oppose Franklin Roosevelt adamantly and to see the "Little House" books as a rebuttal to the New Deal.

Whatever their underlying political convictions, the two women's collaboration produced compelling stories that created devoted fans who increased in numbers as each of the original eight novels appeared. The books about pioneering and farm life provided Wilder with the economic security that decades of actual farming had never accomplished; her fame assured her of a place of honor both in Mansfield and throughout the country. Her mailbox was constantly filled with letters from schoolchildren and librarians, and increasingly children's rooms or entire libraries were named in her honor. Although none of her books became Newbery Prize winners, only runners-up, she was the first recipient of the American Library Association's Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, given every five years to an author for a lifetime's contribution to children's literature. Even her death at 90 at home in Mansfield did not end her readers' fascination with the Laura of the "Little House" books. Given the tens of millions of her books that have been sold in numerous languages, Wilder's influence in perpetuating a specific version of American pioneer life cannot be underestimated.

sources:

Anderson, William. Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography. NY: HarperCollins, 1992.

Fellman, Anita Clair. "'Don't Expect to Depend on Anybody Else': The Frontier as Portrayed in the Little House Books," in Children's Literature. Vol. 24, 1996.

Holtz, William. The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

Miller, John E. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town: Where History and Literature Meet. Lawrence, KN: University Press of Kansas, 1994.

suggested reading:

Anderson, William. A Little House Sampler. NY: Perennial Library, Harper & Row, 1989.

——. "The Literary Apprenticeship of Laura Ingalls Wilder," in South Dakota History. Vol. 13, no. 4. Winter 1983, pp. 285–331.

——. "Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Continuing Collaboration," in South Dakota History. Vol. 16, no. 2. Summer 1986, pp. 89–143.

Fellman, Anita Clair. "Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Politics of a Mother-Daughter Relationship," in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Vol. 15, no. 3. Spring 1990, pp. 535–561.

Hackett, Christine Olivieri. Little House in the Classroom: A Guide to Using the Laura Ingalls Wilder Books. Carthage, IL: Good Apple, 1989.

collections:

Correspondence, papers, manuscripts, and memorabilia located in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa; the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association in Mansfield, Missouri; and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society in De Smet, South Dakota.

related media:

"Little House on the Prairie," weekly television series based on the books, starring Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert , NBC, 1974–82.

Anita Clair Fellman , Director of Women's Studies and Associate Professor of History, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia