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. ( )

Fantastic read about the Ingalls family, the times they lived in, and Laura's writing life. I especially enjoyed Fraser's depiction of Laura's writing partnership with her daughter Rose. What an intense collaboration and intertwined relationship. ( )

super interesting look at a prominent and important historical figure. The book didnt shy away from talking about the unpleasant aspects of Laura or her daughter either. ( )

In this biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, we see Wilder's life in three acts. The first act is her childhood. Although the novels that Wilder wrote are highly fictionalized accounts of her life, the broad outline they provide is true. What they sugarcoat is the hardship and deprivation that the family experienced. This is most apparent through what is left out. Wilder leaves out difficult years where the family lived in cramped conditions and barely managed to get by financially. She intentionally ends the series with her marriage, leaving out the devastating hardship that she and Almanzo experienced in the early years of their marriage. (That material is covered somewhat in The First Four Years which Wilder did not write for publication).

In the second act, Laura and Almanzo Wilder established themselves in Missouri. Although they still experienced hardship, they avoided the dramatic challenges of the early years of their marriage. Wilder took on a larger role in her community, working for the Farm Loan Association, writing for a rural newspaper, and getting involved in clubs. Her daugher, Rose Wilder Lane, became in increasingly prominent figure during this time, both in the biography itself and by establishing herself as a writer of some renown. It was Lane who convinced Wilder that writing was a way to improve her family's financial security. During this time, Wilder made early attempts to write about her childhood. This was inspired, in part, by the death of her father.

In the third act, after the death of her mother and her older sister, Wilder wrote the Little House books which were published to increasing acclaim. The world was in chaos: the books were mostly published during the Great Depression and World War II. Despite that -- or perhaps because of that -- the sense of nostalgia they invoked made them successful. Wilder finally achieved the financial security she had hoped for all her life.

That's the sparse outline of Wilder's life. But what does this biography bring beyond the facts of her life? In addition to providing a deeper sense of the historical context of Wilder's life, Fraser's biography has two major thematic elements. The first is that the pioneer life was never as independent as it was made out to be. It was also doomed to failure from the start. The pioneers depended on the government in many ways. It was the government that displaced the Native Americans who had lived in the lands that would be settled by pioneers like the Ingalls family. Pioneer life was dependent on railroads and banks which benefited hugely from government money. But that is not the only reason that the pioneer life was not as independent as it was made out to be. Even before opening up the Dakota Territory for homesteading, scientists already had informed the government that the arid part of the west was not suited for individual farms. Community based irrigation schemes might, perhaps, have been feasible. Thus, repeated crop failures that the Ingalls and later the Wilders experienced were not individual bad luck. They were the result of systematic, predictable challenges due to the nature of the environment.

The second theme is the intimate and emotionally fraught relationship between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. It would be fair to say this book is just as much a biography of Rose Wilder Lane as it is of her mother. Lane encouraged Wilder to write and was deeply involved in the editing of the Little House books. In the early novels, Lane's editing went deep enough that it would not be unfair to say she was a co-author, though Fraser convincingly makes the case that Wilder was clearly the primary creative force behind the series. It was not only their writing that was intertwined. Rose Wilder Lane kept her finances intertwined with those of her parents throughout her life. She would alternately give them gifts, sometimes lavish ones, and take loans from them to keep her afloat in hard times. Their relationship was similarly confused. At times, they showed affection for each other (Wilder more often for her daughter than the other way). They also resented each and disapproved of each other during much of their relationship.

Caroline Fraser does not treat Lane kindly. To be fair, that is partially because the evidence supports that Lane was an unpleasant person with problematic ethics and little care for anyone other than herself. I don't want to defend Lane here. But I do think that Fraser could have taken a more critical look at Wilder's contribution to the frayed relationship. Fraser does not present Wilder as perfect, but when it comes to Wilder and Lane, the bulk of the blame goes to Lane.

Overall, this was a high quality biography that I expect to be a definitive biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder for years to come. I'd give it 4/5 if 50% of the discussion of Rose's life were cut. ( )