This is how Laura Ingalls Wilder described her Little House books in a speech in 1937. As it turns out, the “whole truth” was stranger than fiction in many ways. In Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caroline Fraser tells a story that is much darker than the novels. In addition to the blizzards, fires, and swarms of locusts that threatened their survival, the pattern of bad decision-making on the part of Charles Ingalls also leads them to the brink of disaster more than once. I find this “deeply researched and elegantly written” Pulitzer Prize-winning book spell-binding.
Fraser, Caroline. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Engalls Wilder. Henry Holt and Company, 2017, p. 4.