Biography provides context for ‘Little House’ books

I grew up in the city, but I dreamed of covered wagons. Like countless kids, I read and reread the “Little House” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder while growing up, savoring the details of homemade candy (made on snow!), hand-hewn furniture, floral-print dresses, cozy Christmases and the plaintive music of a fiddle, echoing over the emptiness of a vast prairie.

Born in 1867 Wisconsin to a father struck with wanderlust and a mother content to follow him, Wilder lived a pioneer childhood, moving from place to place with her growing family (she was the second of four sisters) across the American Midwest. The first book, “Little House on the Big Woods,” begins when she is 4 years old; the last in the series, “These Happy Golden Years,” ends with her marriage, at 18, to the young farmer Almanzo Wilder. Throughout the books, there’s a palpable sense that home — be it a dirt-floor dugout, a snug log cabin or a threadbare claim shanty — is made not by doors and windows and possessions, but the secure presence of those you love.

Wilder, who lived to see her 90th birthday and remarkable changes in the world, began writing the books in her 60s, urged by her daughter, Rose. Initially Wilder wrote a memoir intended for adults, called “Pioneer Girl,” but she and Rose had better luck marketing a young reader’s version. They read like fiction — Wilder’s narrative voice is steady and almost childlike, but often beautifully artful — but they depict a real life; at least, a writer’s version of one. I didn’t think, when reading them as a child, of how Wilder might have sculpted the facts of her life, or of what it might mean to depict your beloved parents in anything but a softly shining light.

A fascinating new biography of Wilder, Caroline Fraser’s “Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder” (Metropolitan Books, $35), takes a close look at the author’s life — where it does, and doesn’t, match the legend she created. Though we tend to read the “Little House” books as autobiography, they are “heavily fictionalized in many ways,” said Fraser, in a telephone interview.

“When it came to the ‘Little House’ books, she burnished her parents’ reputation by leaving out a lot of what happened,” Fraser elaborated. In “Pioneer Girl,” she notes, Wilder wrote of the family “experiencing periods of homelessness and aimlessness, her father Charles not being able to pull it together financially.”

Fraser, whose own ancestors were also Midwestern farmers, grew up reading the books, but became fascinated by Wilder’s own story about 20 years ago, when a biography of Rose Wilder Lane was published. “It essentially claimed that Rose had ghostwritten all the “Little House’ books,” she said. Intrigued, Fraser launched her own investigation into the manuscripts, resulting in a long piece in the New York Review of Books.

“I believed then and believe now that Wilder was the author of the books published under her name,” Fraser said.

More recently, Fraser edited the Library of America editions of the “Little House” books, and realized that there was much rich history behind Wilder’s story, particularly what Wilder called the Minnesota Massacre. “It’s more properly referred to as the U.S.Dakota War of 1862,” Fraser said, calling that bloody event “quite central to her experience in Kansas. Knowing what that was and what happened, even though it happened before Laura was born, is, I think, incredibly revealing of her experience and the experience of other white settlers and their attitudes toward Native Americans.”

Fraser’s book begins with that history, and then traces the ancestry of Wilder’s parents, Charles Ingalls and Caroline Quiner Ingalls, taking us to that little house where their second daughter was born. A map shows us the family’s wanderings. One photo, of a preteen Laura posing with sisters Mary and Carrie, is startling: Eyes warily looking away from the camera and jaw set, young Laura is already showing the determination of a pioneer woman, resolved to survive and prosper on an inhospitable land.

And its later pages tell the story of a remarkable mother/daughter relationship. Rose, Wilder’s only child, was a former yellow journalist, war correspondent and fledgling Libertarian; her high-pitched life seems right out of a movie.

Rose, said Fraser, had a “pretty tumultuous” relationship with her mother. “The story of their relationship is kind of at the heart of the book, because it’s at the heart of the creation of the ‘Little House’ books.”