Laura Ingalls Wilder: life of the week

Introduction to Laura Ingalls Wilder

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2:05Consulta a tu médico si los síntomas persisten. American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House novels have enchanted generations of readers with their tales of family life on the 19th century American frontier. And they are the subject of a recent adaptation on Netflix that forms another chapter in the book's long history. In today's episode of the History Extra podcast, Eleanor Evans is joined by Pamela Smith-Hill, author of books including Laura Ingalls Wilder, A Writer's Life,

2:39and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pioneer Girl, The Annotated Autobiography. Together, they discuss Wilder's beloved children's stories and how the success of the series often obscures a more complicated history of hardship, displacement, and prejudice. Thank you so much for joining me on the History Extra podcast today. How are you? I'm doing well, and I'm delighted to be here. I'm delighted to have you here as well because we're in such safe hands to be talking about Laura Ingalls Wilder.

3:09And I wonder for listeners who maybe aren't as familiar with her work, can you give us a little bit of an introduction of her life and her work? What would you like listeners to know straight off the bat? Laura Ingalls Wilder was a revolutionary children's book and young adult author who published in the 1930s and 1940s. Her work forever changed the literary landscape in children's and young adult literature in the United States. But her work became so iconic that over the years and over the many generations, her work has also become very controversial.

3:45So she is at once beloved and at once severely criticized for her portrayal of the past. Still, she casts a very long shadow over modern contemporary American literature. So those are some of the themes we're going to be pulling out a bit today, some of those contradictions. And I wonder before we proceed, could you give listeners a bit of a perspective on how you came towards Laura Ingalls Wilder's work? I grew up about 40 miles from Laura Ingalls Wilder's home, Rocky Ridge Farm, in the Missouri Ozarks, where she wrote the Little House books.

4:19I was a passionate reader, as everyone in the neighborhood knew. And one of our neighbors recommended that I read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. So I immediately went to the bookmobile, found a copy of Little Town on the Prairie in the very back of the bookmobile, and was hooked immediately. And what intrigued me the most about Wilder's books were not only the stories and the family, which I found to be very endearing and interesting, but I was fascinated by the idea that the Laura Ingalls in the books went on to become Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author.

4:54And this resonated with me, because even as a 10-year-old, I wanted to become a writer. But I thought writers lived in London or New York or on the West Coast. It never occurred to me that someone writing in the Missouri Ozarks and living on a farm could go on to write important books. So this really encouraged me. It gave me hope that I could grow up and become a writer myself. And when I did, I moved to South Dakota, where five of Wilder's novels are set.

5:27And it was in South Dakota, seeing her landscapes firsthand, rereading all of the books, that I began to understand that she was not just an important children's book writer, but she was an important American author. And I also began to write about Laura Ingalls Wilder at the time. And in fact, on one of my assignments as a travel writer for the South Dakota Division of Tourism, I got to meet the retired editor of the Dismit South Dakota newspaper.

5:57He had actually known the Ingalls family. He corresponded with Laura Ingalls Wilder while she was writing the books. And I took extensive notes. His name was Aubrey Sherwood. And when I started writing more seriously about Wilder, I took out those notes and used them to have more authenticity about Wilder's life and work. So this is a lifelong affinity for this writer and her life as well. You can see the landscapes that she's writing about.

Early life on the frontier

6:26Can you take us into the world that Laura Ingalls Wilder was writing about, her own life? What factors do we need to understand what was happening in her particular history at this time? Wilder was born in 1867, two years after the American Civil War ended. Her family was living in Wisconsin when she was born. Wisconsin was still considered kind of frontier. But at some point, for reasons we're not entirely sure, Charles and Caroline Ingalls, her parents, moved to Missouri,

6:58which is something that Wilder did not write about. She was only two years old. They stayed in Missouri for maybe just a few weeks. They purchased property from a former slaveholder in Missouri. Now, the Ingalls family had supported the Union. Missouri was a slave state. And after the Civil War, there was a great deal of devastation from the war and a great deal of volatility. So it's possible that the Ingalls family hadn't anticipated that.

7:30And from there, they moved to the Osage Diminished Reserve, Indian country in Wilder's books, located in southeastern Kansas. We think that that's probably where Wilder's first memories were born. When the family moved to the Osage Diminished Reserve in 1869, it too was a very volatile location. The Osage people were in treaty negotiations to move, to give up that land. And the Ingalls family were living there illegally.

8:01They were squatters. According to the historical record, many of the white settlers, whom the Osage called intruders, were harassing them, burning their crops, stealing their horses, in addition to living illegally. So the Osage Diminished Reserve was a very volatile period between 1869 and 1871 when the Wilders lived there. Wilder used these memories and the stories that she had heard from her parents to form her novel, Little House on the Prairie, which has become perhaps the most iconic of the Little House books.

8:39The family lived there for only two years. They ended up moving back to Wisconsin. The real family moved back to Wisconsin and from there moved to Minnesota. Wilder transformed some of the movements, streamlined some of the family's movements to keep them always moving west. But when the family moved to Minnesota, the Ingalls family took out a homestead, seemed to be prospering there, and then were subjected to two to three years of a grasshopper plague.

9:11The Rocky Mountain locusts devoured all the crops, ruined the family's hopes and farms. Wilder wrote about this in her book On the Banks of Plum Creek. And for her, this was a period of failure. And the family ended up moving from Minnesota to Dakota Territory. In addition to struggling with the grasshopper plague in Minnesota, Wilder's older sister Mary became blind. So there was this other tragedy that affected them.

9:42And in the books, Wilder moves the family from Minnesota directly to Dakota Territory. But in reality, the real Ingalls family, after struggling with the grasshopper plague, did not move west. They moved east to Burr Oak, Iowa, temporarily ran a hotel there. A son was born to the family shortly before they left Minnesota. On the way to Iowa, baby Freddie died. He was only nine months old. This part of Wilder's life, she chose not to write about in the books.

10:15She skipped over that part, telling her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, that that was a story in and of itself. It was not the picture she wanted to create of her fictional family.

Family dynamics and hardships

10:25For listeners who aren't as familiar with the Little House books, can you give us a bit of a sense of the family unit? And what sort of themes was she dealing with? What can you pull out for us here? When the Little House books open in Little House in the Big Woods, The family unit includes Pa and Ma, Charles and Caroline Ingalls, Mary, Laura's older sister, who is two years older than Laura, Laura, who is the main character, and baby Carrie. That is the family unit throughout the books until we get to By the Shores of Silver Lake,

10:59when baby Grace is born. A family of four girls like little women, in a way. But the family dynamic is one that is very warm and close, despite the hardships. I will say, however, that from the very beginning, Laura and Mary feud, as Big and Little Sisters often do. And that continues throughout the books until Mary loses her sight. And that moment in the Little House books seems to transform the rivalry between Laura and Mary.

11:36And Laura becomes Mary's eyes, describing the world to her. And the two sisters develop a very strong and very deep bond over the last few books in the series. Pa, I think, is Laura's mentor throughout the series until, as all mentors must do once their young mentees come of age, his role begins to fade. And interestingly, Ma, as Laura ages, takes on a larger role in the stories.

12:09So it's a very interesting dynamic. Despite the hardships, the family values education. They're a very well-read, very literary family. Pa plays his fiddle. They're also a very musical family. They sing together. They dance together. So despite the hardships that they face, they find joy in everyday life and in each other. So there are themes of also hardship, survival. It feels like the stakes for Laura and her family are really high in these hard winters. And that's something that really comes across.

12:40Is that true? Yes. The book, The Long Winter, I think, is Wilder's masterpiece. It is the hardest book to read. And one of the gifts that Wilder brings to her books, too, is that when we're young readers, we just skim over the surface of that darker material. It feels like such an adventure. As an adult, when you go back and read a book like The Long Winter, you realize that the family was on the verge of starvation and freezing to death. This is a book about survival. It was a revolutionary kind of book in the early 1940s when it was published.

13:14No one was writing about survival, hunger, and cold like Wilder does in that book. And it is actually based on the hard winter of 1880, 1881. And the historical record supports Wilder's characterization of the family's struggle during that long winter. But what she does in the book is bring that to life in an unforgettable way. So she moved her family, as I mentioned, in the books, directly from Minnesota to Dakota Territory.

13:47The family finally settled there into Smith, South Dakota. They were among the founding members of that community. And Charles and Caroline Ingalls stayed there for the rest of their lives. Into Smith, young Laura Ingalls went on to become a schoolteacher. She met and married the most eligible bachelor in town, according to her fiction, young Almanzo Wilder. He was 10 years her senior. Their marriage, I think, was a very successful one.

14:17But the first four years of their married life was filled with tragedy. They struggled to maintain their farm. A fire burned down their house. Their crops were destroyed by thunderstorms, terrible summer storms that you get on the prairies in South Dakota. Their daughter Rose was born, but they also lost an infant son. Both Laura and Almanzo were struck with dephtheria. According to Rose, her father decided to go back to work too soon.

14:50He suffered a stroke and was crippled for the rest of his life. In their search for an easier life, the Wilders moved from South Dakota to Florida. And Wilder later wrote about it, saying that despite the exotic setting in Florida, a Yankee woman like herself was a greater oddity, and she never fit in in Florida. The family moved back to the Midwest. They spent some time with Almanzo's family. They returned to DeSmit, and ultimately, in 1894, they decided to move from DeSmit, South Dakota,

15:28to the Missouri Ozarks. And they traveled there by a wagon, a hack. It was about a 600-mile journey. Rose was about six years old. And they bought a property, Ridgeland, outside of a little town called Mansfield, Missouri. And that's where the Wilders spent the rest of their lives. Laura Ingalls Wilder spent 62 of her 90 years in the Missouri Ozarks, although she is known for writing about the prairies. So that's a kind of encapsulation of Wilder's life. Yes, a potted history of her life and what brought her to write about these things.

16:02It sounds like such a nomadic existence. It sounds like there was a lot of change. And you've already alluded to it, but that she was pulling a lot of different threads of this life into her own work, but picking and choosing quite consciously what she showed and what she didn't. So that's something I'd really love our listeners to keep in mind as we go along.

The role of Pa

16:22To pull a little bit on the character of her father, because certainly in her earlier years, Charles Ingalls, or Pa, as he's known in the books that she would come to write, is a real driving force of a lot of this movement. I wonder if you can bring him to life a bit for our listeners. In a letter to her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, I'm going to paraphrase here, but Wilder described her Pa as a hunter and trapper, a musician and poet. He was a very free spirit. I kind of think Charles Ingalls would have been happier as a mountain man

16:54rather than as a pioneer with a family. He was very much a free spirit. He was a carpenter. He valued education. Although I think Caroline Ingalls, Laura's mother, who was a former schoolteacher, really influenced Charles Ingalls' commitment to the education of his girls. But he had this desire to move, to be where, as Wilder put it, where there were more wild animals, where there were fewer people.

17:25And that seems to be one of the reasons that drove him to move his family and to give them this very nomadic existence during Wilder's childhood. And the family didn't really settle down until she was a preteen, about 12 years old, when they finally settled into Smith. And even so, Wilder writes, both in her autobiography and in the Little House books, that Pa really wanted to continue to move west.

17:55He was unsettled, you might say, into Smith and wanted to move all the way to Oregon. And at that point, Caroline Ingalls' ma put her foot down and said, no, this is where we're staying and we're going to finish raising our family here. And you mentioned earlier on that one of the places they do end up on for some time is that land of the Osage nation. This is one of the controversies, I think, that we can perhaps go into a little bit more how Laura Ingalls Wilder chooses to depict that settlement in her novels versus what her father particularly perhaps

Depicting the Osage Nation

18:29did in that situation. How do you characterize this situation and her perception of it? What's interesting about Wilder's depiction of the Osage diminished reserve, the two years that she was there, is that much of it is actually confirmed by the historical record. It makes us very uncomfortable today reading it, but what she portrays is the racism that was at the center of that world. There are fictional characters in Little House on the Prairie

19:01that express extreme hatred for the Osage people. Part of that Wilder hints at in the book is because of the Dakota War of 1862. Now, keep in mind, the action in Little Town on the Prairie begins in 1869, so that conflict was very fresh in people's mind, particularly these fictional characters who came from Wisconsin and Minnesota. They would be very much aware of that Dakota War.

19:34But it's very, very uncomfortable. Over time, the attitudes that those fictional characters who are neighbors in the novel have been associated with the Ingalls family themselves. Now, it's very clear that Caroline Ingalls is afraid of Indians, and at one point in the book, she says that she doesn't like them. And Laura, who is five in the book, says, well, if you don't like them, Ma, why are we here? Which I think is, you know, a very typical response for a child.

20:07The other thing to keep in mind about Little House on the Prairie is that it's all written from a child's perspective, and she's confused about this world. She sees the fear that her mother has for Indians. She hears the very prejudicial comments that the neighbors are saying. And yet her own father, I'm going to paraphrase this here in a scene in Little House on the Prairie, after hearing some very hateful comments from their neighbors, says, well, you know, I don't know that I can agree with that. You know, the Osage have been pushed around

20:38and moved around for so long. No wonder they hate white people. But they're people, and I don't think they're going to hurt us. On the other hand, Charles Ingalls clearly believes in the concept of manifest destiny. Wilder does not use that phrase in the books, but it's very clear that Charles Ingalls believes he has rights to this Indian territory because people who farm and who use the land more effectively from a white perspective should live there. So Charles Ingalls has this very kind of conflicted view.

21:11He sympathizes on the one hand with the Osage, and yet he's willing to push them off their land. So it's a very difficult and uncomfortable concept and book to read in the 21st century, and yet it authentically reproduces many of the attitudes that Wilder remembers from that period, and it depicts the racism that she remembers very clearly. So it's a very uncomfortable read, but I think it's also authentic.

21:42So it's bringing Wilder's own interpretations of these events as a child, and then as an adult writer, and how she chooses to depict it.

Writing her recollections

21:51So let's turn to when she begins to actually write these recollections down. I think I was surprised to learn that it was much later in her life than I expected. What brought her to the writing table and these recollections of her life in this nomadic existence? How did that come about? Well, first, I think Laura Ingalls Wilder always had an ambition to write. There's a scene in These Happy Golden Years, which is Wilder's last book, where Laura has been teaching at the Brewster School, but she goes back to DeSmit to finish her education,

22:23and she goes into the classroom and discovers that her beloved teacher, Mr. Owen, has assigned a composition, and students are supposed to write a composition on ambition, and they've already, all of her classmates have already written theirs, and so in a panic, she writes her own composition, and it turns out to be the best composition of the class, and Mr. Owen praises her for this composition. Well, interestingly enough, this is a real event.

22:55Wilder wrote about it in her autobiography, but more importantly, the original ambition essay is part of the archives at the Rocky Ridge Museum in Missouri. She kept that essay for the rest of her life, and I think it was important to her because it signaled approval of her writing from someone that she admired, an appreciative audience, and even when she was a teenager, she wrote verse.

23:25She also kept a newspaper clipping published in the DeSmit paper. It was basically a letter home to her family as they were moving from South Dakota to Missouri, and she kept that newspaper clipping. It, too, is part of the archives, and she wrote in her own handwriting first piece I ever published. So I think Wilder always wanted to write. She began writing professionally in 1911 when she submitted an article to the Missouri Ruralist,

23:56which was the leading agricultural newspaper in the state of Missouri with a significant subscription base. She went on to become a columnist and an editor, and she wrote for the Ruralist from 1911 until 1924. One of her last columns for the Missouri Ruralist is set in South Dakota. It is her memory of teaching school at what in the books is the Brewster School, but was in fact the Bucci School. It was a very unhappy period in her life,

24:27a very challenging assignment. And she wrote a column about a Christmas when a young man came to her rescue on Christmas Eve and took her on a long, very cold drive in 40-degree below-zero weather back to her home so she could celebrate Christmas with her family. Readers of the Little House books will recognize this as the basis for a cold ride in these happy golden years. But I think it's significant that she started writing about her past

24:57as a columnist for the Missouri Ruralist in 1924. And then in probably 1929, she began to write her autobiography, which was not published during her lifetime. It was called Pioneer Girl. She wrote about it perhaps in part because by this time, 1929, 1930, the Depression had struck. Rocky Ridge Farm was needing more finances. Her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was already a successful journalist and author.

25:30And it could be that at Rose's suggestion, Wilder decided to write about her past. But we also know that as early as 1903, after her father died, and long before Wilder was doing any professional writing, she appears to have jotted down notes for a ghost story. A ghost story set on the Dakota Prairies. And it's just a fragment, but it's quite interesting. So she was already in 1903,

26:00kind of mulling over her past, thinking about it. Then we have a letter that Wilder received from her daughter, Rose, saying, you know, Mother, I don't think there's any opportunity for you to write children's books. So Wilder had apparently submitted some children's stories for Rose to read, and Rose didn't think it was a good idea. But we also know from that letter that some of the ideas that Wilder was exploring at this time were stories about her past.

26:30So she apparently was mulling over what to do about her past, how to get that on paper, for almost two decades before she started writing Pioneer Girl. And she wrote Pioneer Girl for an adult audience. The hope was that she could sell it to a prominent magazine, such as the Saturday Evening Post or the Ladies' Home Journal, sell it as a syndicated piece, and then sell it again in book form.

27:00So she was hoping to make some money off of this project. Unfortunately, Pioneer Girl went nowhere. But I think Rose Wilder Lane reconsidered the idea about children's stories, because by 1929, 1930, American children's publishing was coming into its own. Rose Wilder Lane's good friend, friends Bert and Elmer Hader were making a very prosperous career out of being children's book writers and illustrators.

27:32And she, Rose Wilder Lane, decided to pull out some stories from Pioneer Girl that seemed to resonate with children. To cut to the chase, those stories became Little House in the Big Woods, Wilder's first book. So Rose Wilder Lane compiled some of those stories, sent them back east, probably to Berta Hayter, who then turned them over to an editor. And then the editor, of course, was impressed,

28:02but wanted more meat on the bones of those stories. And so Laura Ingalls Wilder rewrote that very sketchy outline of a manuscript called When Grandma Was a Little Girl and turned it into Little House in the Big Woods. But I do want to point out that when she wrote Little House in the Big Woods, she was basing a lot of that book on her father's stories and memories from Wisconsin. She had not envisioned yet a series of Little House books. That came later.

28:34And so the series itself actually launches, you might say, with Little Town on the Prairie. That's where the Ingalls family, the fictional Ingalls family, begins their quest to move west and find a home. That's book four, is that right? It's book three. Book three. Book one was Little House in the Big Woods. Her second book was Farmer Boy. And in some ways, Farmer Boy, which follows the life of the childhood of her husband, Almanzo, is kind of the mirror image of Little House in the Big Woods.

29:06Little House in the Big Woods is about a frontier family in the 19th century living and working on the frontier. And Farmer Boy is also about a 19th century family, but they're a more prosperous family in the East living and working their land. So neither books really have the forward action that we kind of think about and associate with the Little House books. That doesn't really come into play until Little House on the Prairie.

29:37And that book was number three in the series.

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Collaboration with Rose Wilder Lane

31:22Now, another controversy we might sort of get into a bit here or something that's maybe dogged Laura Ingalls Wilder's writing or questions about her writing is how much influence her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, you've already alluded to, is very influential in getting these books off the ground. But there's a question of how much they collaborate and how much she influences. Why is this so controversial?

31:45The controversy, I think, really began in the 1990s with a biography of Rose Wilder Lane. And her biographer contended that Rose was the ghost in the Little House books, essentially the ghost writer of the books. And so that controversy has surrounded Wilder ever since. If, however, you look more closely at what I call the editorial correspondence between Rose Wilder Lane and Laura Ingalls Wilder,

32:16it's very clear that Rose did influence her mother in many ways. Rose was Wilder's first reader and her first editor. Rose came out of the newspaper industry where editing is much more aggressive. She had a great deal of confidence in herself as an editor. If you look at Rose's diaries, however, she lacks the confidence for herself as an author. So it's very interesting. Rose Wilder Lane is a very complex and interesting character in her own right.

32:49But she, I think, made her mother a better writer. But if you look back and forth at the editorial correspondence between them, Rose Wilder Lane sometimes gave her mother very bad editorial advice. When Wilder was working on By the Shores of Silver Lake, where Laura was essentially going to become a teenager, the editorial correspondence indicates that Rose Wilder Lane suggested that Wilder change main characters from Laura to Carrie because Rose felt

33:20that young readers would not be interested in a teenage character. There would be too much adult stuff in the books, as Rose Wilder Lane put it. And Laura Ingles Wilder wrote back and said, we can't change main characters in the middle of a series. And she said, Laura as a character will know about adult stuff and understand it. It was there, it's realistic, and young readers will appreciate it. At the same time, Rose also recommended that her mother

33:50do not include Mary's blindness in the books. That she should just skim over that. Mary should just have her vision through the rest of the series and go on and be a happy-go-lucky young woman. And again, Wilder said, no, that's a very bad idea because we can't develop Laura without Mary's blindness because, of course, Laura, as she grows older, becomes Mary's eyes. And it's her power of description as she's working

34:21with Mary that lays the foundation for the writer that she will later become. So, in some ways, Rose Wilder Lane helped her mother tremendously. In other ways, she provided some really, really bad editorial advice. And something that I think Rose Wilder Lane's biographer failed to point out is that without Pioneer Girl, Rose Wilder Lane herself would not have written the last two novels of her career.

34:51She actually lifted material directly from Pioneer Girl. And particularly in her first Pioneer novel, Let the Hurricane Roar, she probably did this without Laura Ingalls Wilder's knowledge. And, quite frankly, if Wilder and Lane were not mother and daughter, Lane would have been guilty of plagiarism and I think would have come under a great deal of literary attack for lifting so much material from someone else's unpublished work. And, in fact,

35:22the main characters in Let the Hurricane Roar are named Charles and Caroline. What a complex relationship underpinning the set of children's novels. I think it's really interesting to hear more about that and to delve into their relationship just a little bit. But, regardless of their tricky dynamic, these books are a roaring success.

Reception in the 1930s

35:41I wonder if you can tell me more about how they're received in the 1930s. Wilder did something quite revolutionary in the 1930s. As I've hinted earlier, her books have a realism that her contemporaries chose not to depict. Wilder wasn't the first children's book writer in the United States writing about the pioneer experience. There were several other important writers writers at the same time.

36:12Little House on the Prairie was published in 1935. It was largely ignored by the American Library Association. And I think in part it was because of the very real and very gritty way she depicted not just the racism, but the pioneer experience. Laura, even as a five-year-old, has these deep, dark, existential thoughts about what might have happened, what could have happened. she understands the danger that she's experiencing even as a

36:42child. In 1935, Carol Ryru Brink published Caddy Woodlawn, which covers some of the same concepts, some of the same ideas. But Caddy Woodlawn's character as an 11-year-old never really experiences those deep, dark, existential thoughts. And it's written more as an adventure book. And in 1935, it received the Newbery Medal. So you have two frontier novels, one that's more of an adventure book,

37:13one that is more gritty and realistic. And the literary establishment chose the more conventional approach. But as Wilder's career continued, and as the depression deepened, the literary establishment began to realize that young readers of the 1930s and 1940s were experiencing dark, existential, lives themselves. And they found in Wilder's books something realistic that they could

37:44relate to. The books became relatable. And over time, the convention of dealing with darker, deeper, more existential issues in books for children became a convention of the genre. But at the time Wilder was writing, she was doing something new. And I think that deep emotional realism, as well as the authenticity of her books, spoke to that generation of depression-era young readers. Although Wilder changed the

38:14facts of her life a bit to tell a better story, she was also very interested in the authenticity of the period. And she talks about, to Rose Wilder Lane, the pioneer stoicism that she remembered from those trying times on the frontier. And I think that pioneer stoicism resonated with young readers who were dealing with the Depression. So Wilder was at once mining her past, but interpreting it in a way that would

38:45speak to the generation that she was writing for. And I think that's why her books became so iconic during the 1940s, and why in 1954, the American Library Association created the Lifetime Achievement Medal in her name. So that's obviously a tremendous legacy. And she doesn't live much longer than that, does she? She dies 1957? Right, she dies three years later. And of course, the ALA has stripped her

39:16name from that award. They did that back in 2018. And again, based on primarily the controversy over racism in her books. So a really mixed legacy there. Maybe we should say something a bit about her death first of all. How does

Later years and legacy

39:34her life come to an end? Wilder's husband, Almanzo, died in 1949. And Wilder decided to live on alone at Rocky Ridge Farm. By then, they had sold much of the property, and it was no longer a working farm. She relied on neighbors. She was well-known in the community. She received hundreds and hundreds of letters from adoring fans. But toward the end of her life, she was no longer able

40:05to respond to all of them as she initially had done. In 1953, a new edition of The Little House Books was released with the illustrations that most of us know by Garth Williams. And then in 1957, she died. And she died at home. She had been struggling with diabetes, and it was a very quiet death. Rose Wilder Lane supervised the funeral, supervised going through the house. Now, she also

40:35burned a lot of material, so there's a lot of material that's lost to us now. And she and her husband are both buried in Mansfield, Missouri, in a very small and quiet cemetery there. But Rose, I think, had the foresight to know that her mother had accomplished something extraordinary, and she worked with the local community in Mansfield to preserve the house. And of course, now it's not just the house that is preserved,

41:06but a large museum. They have a very impressive archive. They have reconstructed Wilder's Chicken Coop and Almanzo's Garage, and there are plans to reconstruct the barn. So they're trying to preserve the house in a way that it might have looked in the 1930s and 1940s when she was actually writing the books. So Rose had the foresight then to see that this legacy of the books that her mum had written in her 60s, they'd made

41:37waves in 1930s and 40s for children who want to connect with these ideas of resilience, reality, see that on the page. She sees this legacy. So perhaps we can go into that a little bit more. A notable moment we should mention is the 1970s television adaptation, which potentially causes this story to reach a whole new generation. What can you say about that? Well, most of us talk about it as the Michael Landon little house books because Michael Landon portrays Pa. His characterization of Pa is

42:09totally his own, and the 1970s version is very much a reimagined take on Wilder's books. I mentioned that pioneer stoicism earlier. In the Little House books, Laura rarely cries. She's a very tough young woman as she matures, but in Michael Landon's version of the story, someone cries in almost every episode, and there's a very strong moral lesson usually in

42:39every episode, and Wilder herself trusted her readers to make their own decisions about what happens in her novels. She was not a didactic writer, so it's a very different take on the books, but it certainly resonated with audiences in the 1970s, and I have since met fans who totally embrace only Michael Landon's Little House series and have never read the books. There are many who have read

43:09only the books and despise the 1970s series, and then there's a larger universe where audiences love the Little House books and love the Michael Landon series, and they just embrace both of them enthusiastically. Accept the differences. Yes. The only thing I do want to mention, too, is that we should probably credit Laura Ingalls Wilder with pioneering the young adult category. We think of the young adult category

43:39as being a fixed literary genre, but as I mentioned earlier, Rose didn't want her mother to pursue an older young adult character in the series. She didn't feel that readers would respond to it in a positive way. More importantly, she thought editors wouldn't like it, but Wilder persevered, and I think it's really important to point out that the young adult category wasn't formally recognized until 1958, a year after Wilder herself died.

44:11So she was taking a huge risk at the time, and it certainly paid off. More evidence of that legacy,

Adaptations and modern views

44:18extraordinary.

Adaptations and modern views

44:19So here's clearly been a long afterlife, and it's stretched to our present day. We do have a current adaptation running on Netflix in 2026. I wonder if there's a thought from you on what each retelling tells us about our own times, what it has to say about our own values and how we're imposing them on Laura Ingalls Wilder's writing, or perhaps as she was recalling her own memories of these pioneer times. The new series, which is airing on Netflix and is already filming a second season, is

44:49also a reimagining of her work. And I think what the new series does so beautifully is it captures the lyricism of her literary landscapes. If you've never read the Little House books, Wilder's descriptions of the prairie and the natural world are quite beautiful and quite lyrical. She uses very simple, concrete vocabulary in a way very much like the poet Mary Oliver does. And it's quite beautiful and

45:19moving, and the new series captures that beauty on screen. It's quite remarkable. beautiful, but it also gives us a more comfortable and comforting view of the past. And I think right now, when, particularly in the United States, there's so much divisiveness, so much political hatred on both sides, and distrust on both sides, this new

45:50series tries to show a frontier frontier that is tolerant and more accepting, that's not necessarily what we see in Wilder's books themselves, but I think it gives us this view of the past that perhaps can give us more hope about our own future.

46:10That was Pamela Smith-Hill speaking to Eleanor Evans. Pamela's latest book is Too Good to Be Altogether Lost, a look back at the Little House books, which closely examines Wilder's texts, her characters, and their stories.

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