6 Must-reads for Laura Ingalls Wilder Fans

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, by Wendy McClure
In addition to her real career as an author and editor, Wendy McClure is the twisted genius behind the @halfpintingalls twitter account, where she manages the undead Laura Ingalls Wilder’s social media presence (sample tweet: “Twisting hay sticks? More like twisting hay SUCKS! #longwinter”). The Wilder Life is McClure’s chronicle of her attempts to realize her dream of living in “Laura World.” What does salt pork taste like? Is churning butter a good use of one’s time? As she traces the path of the Ingalls family’s travels, McClure realizes she’s not just searching for Laura’s childhood—she’s searching for her own.

The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories, by Barbara M. Walker
If churning butter isn’t enough for you, it might be time to advance to The Little House Cookbook. More an adventure in food history than a how-to manual, The Little House Cookbook is full of information about historical methods of food storage, frontier diets, and cooking techniques. Recipes range from the plausible (sourdough biscuits), to the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me (spit-roasted wild duck, anyone?). This isn’t an academic text, but an unabashedly geeky attempt to figure out exactly what all that food tasted like. After all, if sharing food is one way to express love, then of course we want to share a meal or two with our favorite characters. As Walker writes, “One mother even advised me to ‘skip Farmer Boy if don’t want to get into that ice cream making mess.’ In fact, we skipped nothing.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life, by Pamela Smith Hill
Hill wrote this biography before embarking on the annotations for Pioneer Girl, and you’ll find some of the same insights here, including a detailed examination of the evolution of Wilder’s style as a writer. Hill considers the contributions both Wilder and Lane made to the Little House books, and discusses the strategic way Wilder crafted “the picture I am making of the family.” A must for anyone curious about memoir, “creative nonfiction,” or the history of the American West.

West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, San Francisco, 1915, by Laura Ingalls Wilder
This one reads like a fanfic in which Laura Ingalls Wilder visits San Francisco, except for the part where it really happened. Wilder’s trip west to visit her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, coincided with the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Almanzo had to stay home and mind the farm, so Wilder wrote him a series of detailed letters describing everything from her first time wading in the Pacific (a common experience in California) to her first encounter with a kangaroo (less so).

The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane, by William Holtz
This book makes a case for Rose Wilder Lane as the real author of the Little House series. The “ghost” writer of the title, Lane was a successful journalist who regularly wrote for publications like Harper’s and The Saturday Evening Post before the 1929 stock market crash wiped out her savings and forced her to move back in with her parents. It’s undeniable that Lane played a major part in the shaping of the series, including its depiction of a rugged pioneer self-sufficiency intended to bolster Lane’s extreme individualist politics (she hated the New Deal). The more you learn about the book’s coauthor, the more obvious it becomes that the Little House books were never works of naive folk art; they’re the carefully crafted product of two professional journalists.

The Little House Collection, by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The truth is, we don’t need external sources to appreciate how hard life must have been for the Ingalls family; it’s impossible to revisit these stories as an adult without being struck by the strangeness and difficulty of the Ingalls family’s life. But choosing not to dwell on the darkness may have been the more original choice. By portraying a family that finds happiness despite adversity, Wilder gave a human face  to a national melodrama and made a case for the importance of domestic details as a subject for literature. It’s easy to forget how good these books are. Maybe it’s time to remember.