Caroline Fraser Prairie
Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
American Writer’s Museum, 800 N. Michigan Avenue, Second
Floor at 5:30pm
This engrossing biography from Fraser makes clear the
place held by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie novels. The Little House books, for all the hardships
they describe, are paeans to the pioneer spirit, portraying it as triumphant
against all odds. But Wilder’s real life was harder and grittier than that, a
story of relentless struggle, rootlessness, and poverty. It was only in her
sixties, after losing nearly everything in the Great Depression, that she
turned to children’s books, recasting her hardscrabble childhood as a
celebratory vision of homesteading―and achieving fame and fortune in the
process, in one of the most astonishing rags-to-riches episodes in American
letters.
Spanning nearly a century of epochal change, from the
Indian Wars to the Dust Bowl, Wilder’s dramatic life provides a unique
perspective on American history and our national mythology of self-reliance.
With fresh insights and new discoveries, Prairie Fires reveals the complex
woman whose classic stories grip us to this day.
Reader’s Hall. General public.
We will be on hand to sell books before and after the
event.
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