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Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder Hardcover – November 21, 2017
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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
The first comprehensive historical biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the beloved author of the Little House on the Prairie books
Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls―the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser―the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series―masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder’s biography. Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder's tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books.
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.
- Print length640 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMetropolitan Books
- Publication dateNovember 21, 2017
- Dimensions6.41 x 1.57 x 9.61 inches
- ISBN-101627792767
- ISBN-13978-1627792769
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Review
“An absorbing new biography [that] deserves recognition as an essential text.... For anyone who has drifted into thinking of Wilder’s ‘Little House’ books as relics of a distant and irrelevant past, reading Prairie Fires will provide a lasting cure.... Meanwhile, ‘Little House’ devotees will appreciate the extraordinary care and energy Fraser brings to uncovering the details of a life that has been expertly veiled by myth.”
―The New York Times Book Review(front page)
“Fraser's meticulous biography has particular urgency today, as she unknots the threads of fact and fiction, of reality and myth, of mother and daughter.... Prairie Fires is not only a work of rigorous scholarship, but it also portrays Wilder, and her daughter Rose, in ways that illuminate our society’s current crises and rifts.”
―The New York Review of Books
“Important and meticulous biography... Complex and astonishing... A subtle, intelligent and quietly explosive study.”
―Financial Times
“The definitive biography... Magisterial and eloquent... A rich, provocative portrait.”
―Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Magnificent... A remarkable, noteworthy biography of an American literary icon. It will captivate Little House fans as well as anyone looking to understand ‘the perpetual hard winter’ of life in frontier times.”
―USA Today
“Impressive... Prairie Fires could not have been published at a more propitious time in our national life.”
―The New Republic
“Unforgettable... A magisterial biography, which surely must be called definitive. Richly documented (it contains 85 pages of notes), it is a compelling, beautifully written story.... One of the more interesting aspects of this wonderfully insightful book is its delineation of the fraught relationship between Wilder and her deeply disturbed, often suicidal daughter.”
―Booklist(starred review)
“A fantastic book. We’ve long understood the Little House series to be a great American story, but Caroline Fraser brings it unprecedented new context, as she masterfully chronicles the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family alongside the complicated history of our nation. Prairie Fires represents a significant milestone in our understanding of Wilder’s life, work, and legacy.”
―Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie
“Meticulously researched, feelingly told, Prairie Fires is the definitive biography of a major writer who did so much to mold public perceptions of the Western frontier. Once again, Caroline Fraser has shown that she is a master of the careful art of sifting a life, finding meaning in the large and small events that shaped an iconic American figure. Prairie Fires is a magnificent contribution to the literature of the West.”
―Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West
“At last, an unsentimental examination of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s real life on the frontier. Caroline Fraser rescues Wilder from frontier myth and gives us the gritty, passionate woman who endured the harshest experiences of homesteading, loved the Great Plains, and was devastated by their ultimate ruin and loss. Elegantly written and impeccably researched, Prairie Fires is a major contribution to environmental history and literary biography.”
―Linda Lear, author of Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature and Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature
“In the twenty-first century, the tense and secret authorial partnership between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane has emerged as the most complex and fascinating psychological saga of mother-daughter collaboration in American literary history. Caroline Fraser’s deeply researched and stimulating biography analyzes their controversial relationship and places Wilder’s influential fiction in the contexts of other myths of pioneer women and the frontier.”
―Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers and The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe
“Engrossing… Exhilarating… Lovers of the series will delight in learning about real-life counterparts to classic fictional episodes, but, as Fraser emphasizes, the true story was often much harsher. Meticulously tracing the Ingalls and Wilder families’ experiences through public records and private documents, Fraser discovers failed farm ventures and constant money problems, as well as natural disasters even more terrifying and devastating in real life than in Wilder’s writing. She also helpfully puts Wilder’s narrow world into larger historical context.”
―Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prairie Fires
The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
By Caroline FraserHenry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2017 Caroline FraserAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62779-276-9
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
A Note on Quotations,
Map,
Introduction,
On the Frontier,
PART I: THE PIONEER,
1. Maiden Rock,
2. Indian Summers,
3. Crying Hard Times,
4. God Hates a Coward,
5. Don't Leave the Farm, Boys,
PART II: THE EXILE,
6. A World Made,
7. As a Farm Woman Thinks,
8. The Absent Ones,
9. Pioneer Girl,
PART III: THE DREAM,
10. A Ruined Country,
11. Dusty Old Dust,
12. We Are All Here,
13. Sunshine and Shadow,
14. There Is Gold in the Farm,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Index,
Photos,
Acknowledgments,
Also by Caroline Fraser,
About the Author,
Copyright,
CHAPTER 1
Maiden Rock
The Legend
"I was born in a log house within ... miles of legend-haunted Lake Pepin," Laura Ingalls Wilder would write.
The lake was legendary before she was born. Where the Mississippi swallows the Chippewa, a wide tributary flowing sluggishly out of great Wisconsin pine forests to the north, the river swells at the delta, like a snake that has just devoured something. That swollen spot, widest on the Mississippi, is Lake Pepin.
Its dark waters are presided over by Maiden Rock, an immense four-hundred-foot limestone bluff so visually arresting that everyone had a story to tell about it. Like everything else, the story belonged to the Indians: Maiden Rock was a lover's leap, they said, where a Dakota girl in love with a young man leapt impetuously to her death rather than marry another. Those who passed at dusk were said to hear her sorrowful song.
Whites would tell and retell the story until it had been rubbed smooth, playing up its romanticism, painting the scene in gloomy olives and mauves. George Catlin camped for days along Lake Pepin, hauling his canoe out of the water and gathering colorful pebbles by the handful, "precious gems ... rich agates." Catlin told the story, and so did Mark Twain and the poet William Cullen Bryant, who specialized in brooding Indians.
Maiden Rock captured the imagination of Charles Ingalls, who told his daughters stories about the rock, the lake, and the Indians. On one memorable occasion, he brought them to the beach bordering the town of Pepin, just across the water from Minnesota, where they discovered the same pebbles, "pretty pebbles that had been rolled back and forth by the waves until they were polished smooth."
Like Catlin, Wilder as a tiny girl gathered them by the handful, stuffing so many in her pocket that they tore her dress. Her mother gently reproved her for being so greedy. But as Wilder chose to remember it, her father just laughed, delighted.
She loved both her parents, but her primary, overwhelming identification was with her father. Charles had brown hair and blue eyes, just as she did. Whenever she did something naughty, even as he punished her he had a glint in his eye that told her it would be all right, that he was moments away from holding her on his knee and telling her how bad he himself had been as a boy. He was charming, cheerful, and musical, playing by ear songs that would lift his family's spirits — and he was an incomparable storyteller.
All of her stories begin with him, all of her memories. Her first, she would say later, was "of my Father always," carrying her in his arms, rocking her to sleep. "The feeling, the voice and the dim light over the log wall make a picture that will never fade," she wrote.
* * *
Discovering how Charles Ingalls and his family came to find themselves a few miles from the shores of Lake Pepin, just a few years after Pepin County was first marked on a map, is a detective story tracking generations into the past. Pieces of the family portrait survive, but the whole remains elusive, obscured under the soot of time. It may never be complete.
That is always a problem, in writing about poor people. The powerful, the rich and influential, tend to have a healthy sense of their self-importance. They keep things: letters, portraits, and key documents, such as the farm record of Thomas Jefferson, which preserved the number and identity of his slaves. No matter how far they may travel, people of high status and position are likely to be rooted by their very wealth, protecting fragile ephemera in a manse or great home. They have a Mount Vernon, a Monticello, a Montpelier.
But the Ingallses were not people of power or wealth. Generation after generation, they traveled light, leaving things behind. Looking for their ancestry is like looking through a glass darkly, images flickering in obscurity. As far as we can tell, from the moment they arrived on this continent they were poor, restless, struggling, constantly moving from one place to another in an attempt to find greater security from hunger and want. And as they moved, the traces of their existence were scattered and lost. Sometimes their lives vanish from view, as if in a puff of smoke.
So as we look back across the ages, trying to find what made Laura's parents who they were, imagine that we're on a prairie in a storm. The wind is whipping past and everything is obscured. But there are the occasional bright, blinding moments that illuminate a face here and there. Sometimes we hear a voice, a song snatched out of the air.
That Poverty Beat
Charles Ingalls was born at a crossroads. As if to fulfill the prophecy in that, he would always be a wanderer, propelled by hopes of a better future farther on.
But his rootlessness was not simply the sign of a "wandering foot," as his daughter would suggest. It reflected generations of struggle, trying to break through, hoping to latch on to land. He would be among the first to make his way west, but he was not the first to know poverty. From the family's earliest beginnings in Puritan New England, that was all they would ever know. And the life of the previous generations had been even harder than Charles's own.
When Charles's father was a young boy, Charles told his daughters, he and his brothers labored for six days a week, Monday through Saturday. During the winter, they got up in the dark, did their chores by lamplight, and worked until the sun went down, going to bed directly after supper. For play, they had a few hours off on Saturday afternoons. At sundown on Saturday, the "Puritan Sabbath" would begin.
On the Sabbath, all recreational pursuits, indeed all activities other than going to church or praying or studying a catechism, were strictly forbidden. There was no visiting, no sweeping, no gardening, no hunting, no haying, no fishing, no frivolous talk, no writing of notes or cutting of hair or kissing of children. Hot meals could not be prepared and horses could not be hitched to the wagon. To obey the Sabbath, the Ingalls family walked, reverently, to church. To break the Sabbath was a grave, even criminal offense, punishable by fines, public censure, or imprisonment.
A flash of lightning in history's darkness gives us a glimpse of one such Sunday, more than two centuries before Laura's birth. Family lore has long maintained that the very first member of the Ingalls clan on this continent, Edmund Ingalls, arrived in Salem Harbor in 1628 with the expedition of John Endecott, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. We know little about the man; there isn't even a portrait of him. But we know that on April 20, 1646, he was fined for "bringing home sticks in both his arms on the Sabbath day," presumably for firewood. Even worse, the sticks were stolen from somebody else's fence.
Another moment in bright relief: Edmund's last will and testament, sworn out two years after his theft. He bestowed upon his wife a house in Lynn and the lot it sat on, as well as "ye Stock of Cattle and Corne." One daughter was left a "heifer Calf," another "two Ewes." A third, Mary, received "the heifer Calfe that formerly she enjoyed." Whatever Edmund possessed was in that livestock and small plots of land, perhaps poor plots, as in the "three acres of marsh ground" bequeathed to his son Henry. What his livestock may have been worth is hard to say. A large number of cattle were imported to the northern colonies from Virginia in the 1640s, depressing their price.
There is one final discordant glimpse of the Ingalls family in the seventeenth century. One of Edmund's granddaughters would become notorious, victim of New England's most lurid hour. Martha Ingalls Allen Carrier, born to Edmund's daughter Faith, was dubbed the "Queen of Hell" during the Salem witchcraft trials by shrieking teenage accusers. She was said to have been seen riding a broomstick, to have caused neighbors' cows to sicken and die, to have started a smallpox epidemic. Cotton Mather called her "a rampant hag." In 1692, at the age of thirty-eight, the mother of several children, she was taken to Gallows Hill and hanged, having never wavered in proclaiming her innocence. Did her fate have anything to do with the family edging away from the country's Puritan heartland? We cannot know, but the intense impoverishment of a time when farmers "fought over ever-diminishing slivers of soil," as a historian put it, spurred neighbors to attack each other.
Skip forward eighty years or so, and our most sustained flash of illumination catches Laura's great-grandfather, Samuel Ingalls, born in New Hampshire in 1770. A self-lacerating individual, Samuel became a writer, in a family that would produce many of them. Devout and patriotic, he captured the suffering of yeoman farmers in a way that undermines Thomas Jefferson's golden vision of "those who labor in the earth" as "the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people."
As a young man, Samuel spent years living in Canada, perhaps exporting crops or other goods to America. There, in 1793, he married Margaret Delano, descendant of one of the passengers on the Mayflower. Generations later, the illustrious Delanos would produce an American president.
Like Edmund Ingalls, Samuel was a Puritan and may have been a Congregationalist. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was strongly associated with the Congregationalist church, a Protestant denomination devoted to the precept that every parish should be self-governing. In a land in which independence and autonomy would become bywords, Congregationalists applied those principles with a will.
Unlike his stick-pilfering forebear, though, Samuel was unwavering in his rigid religiosity. On one occasion, his young sons, after a grueling week of chopping trees in midwinter, dared to sneak away for a forbidden sled ride on Sunday afternoon. As they shot past their house, their father's stern visage appeared in the doorway. On their return, they were greeted with silence. But the minute the sun went down, they were taken to the woodshed, one by one, and whipped.
Religion suffused Samuel's politics. A vehement broadside that he published in 1809 against Thomas Jefferson's Embargo Act, denouncing the president's party as a "wicked club," summoned a vision of a carriage of angels, crowned in gold and armed with burnished scepters "about six or seven feet in length."
Descending on the town of Hartford, Connecticut, the angels shake the ground as if with an earthquake, arriving to deliver a partisan message against the president who had made trade with Canadian territories a crime. Hampering free trade was not simply an inconvenience or a bad decision. To Samuel, it was a sin.
In 1825, he published his Rhymes of "The Unlearned Poet," the title humbly acknowledging his amateur status. None of the original copies are known to survive, but from transcribed verses in the family papers his voice emerges impassioned and vital. He was an uncertain prosodist, his rhymes awkward and lines galloping. But what he lacked in finesse he made up for in sheer verve.
American exceptionalism was his great theme. Visions of the country's past rose before him in celestial glory, its heroes vanquishing the British "like lions," its pioneers withstanding the "savage whoops" and "scalping knives" of Indians. The very land under their plows, he told his readers, had been purchased in blood. Other verses in the book showed Samuel transfixed by natural disasters, as later generations of the family would be. His "Lines ... On The Great Hail and Wind Storm That Passed Through the Counties of Cattarraugus and Allegany in the Spring of 1834" exclaimed over eight-inch hail stones, and depicted a tornado — a column of air "filled / With the ruins of that day" — carrying away entire houses.
To Puritans, every affliction — storms, pestilence, earthquakes — signaled God's judgment, and grappling with such calamities was the responsibility of the individual. The Ingallses' fixation on strict Sabbath observations would lapse as successive generations journeyed away from New England; one can even see the strictures relax over the course of Laura's memoir, as the family moves west. But one thing would never fade away: the belief in self-reliance as an absolute sacrament.
The most plaintive of Samuel's poems, "A Ditty on Poverty," acknowledged an invincible foe: hunger. "I've fought him for years in battle so strong, / But never could drive him an inch from the ground. / But many a time I had to retreat, / But scorn'd for to own that poverty beat." The poem echoed the Biblical warning against penury as a creeping evildoer waiting to strike the slothful. Americans would later slough off the personification, but need still retains a whiff of shame.
Another piece in the book speaks of the melancholy of missing lost friends and family, of lying awake at night listening to "the midnight owl," hungry wolves, and screaming panthers. Samuel, in the seventh generation of Ingallses in America, translated that sorrow into song. Unto the ninth and tenth generations, his descendants would sing it too.
* * *
By the time that Rhymes of "The Unlearned Poet" was published, Samuel and his family had returned from Canada to the United States, moving to Cuba Township in the far west of New York State. His youngest son, Lansford, born in 1812, would marry a woman named Laura. They raised a family of ten, their first, Peter, born near Cuba in 1833. A second died in infancy. The third, born January 10, 1836, was Charles Phillip Ingalls.
Cuba was a dark, dirty, and gloomy place, resting uneasily on swampy ground. Dotted with "unsightly stumps," the village hosted a tannery, an ashery producing lye, and lumber and stone mills. A railroad and canal were being constructed when Charles was a boy. As a child, he may have heard tales of the wolves and wildcats that had made life "pandemonium" for early settlers in the region. Bounties had thinned out the animals; the last wolf howl was heard around 1840, when Charles was four.
The town was a popular jumping-off point for the West, with families camping there in the winter to await spring passage. Cuba's Main Street served so many migrants wallowing across the town's primitive roads toward Lake Erie that an early history called it "one continuous mudhole ... a mirehole in the center of a swamp." Charles would have watched countless wagons heading westward. Safe to say, he yearned to join them.
Charles's childhood coincided with America's first great depression, the Panic of 1837, which lasted a Biblical seven years. A newspaper out of Albany, the Knickerbocker, reported in 1837 that "there never was a time like this," with "rumor after rumor of riot, insurrection, and tumult." Banks collapsed, and unemployment climbed to 25 percent. Factories along the eastern seaboard were shuttered, and soup kitchens opened in major cities. Two out of three New Yorkers were said to be without means of support. Eight states defaulted on loans. In his literary magazine, Horace Greeley made the first of his famous entreaties to pull up stakes: "Fly, scatter through the country, go to the Great West, anything rather than remain here."
Two of Charles's uncles quickly heeded that appeal, embarking for the West around 1838. And when Charles was eight or nine, his family loaded up their own wagon and headed in the same direction, shaking off Cuba's mud forever.
The first railway connecting New York to Chicago lay several years in the future, so the family likely skirted below Lake Erie, picking up the Chicago Road. Formerly known to the Indians as the Great Sauk Trail, the road from Detroit and Fort Dearborn to Chicago — then a burgeoning town of a few thousand people — was traversed by thousands of pioneers during the 1830s and '40s. From there, the Ingallses headed forty miles west to Elgin, Illinois, a frontier outpost on the Fox River.
This was Charles Ingalls's first sight of the open plains. After the closed-in gloom of upstate New York, rolling western grasslands must have been a revelation. According to another settler, the Illinois prairies were still a thrilling "wolf-howling wilderness," packed with game and hopping with prairie chickens. Writing to a friend back in Kentucky, Daniel Pingree, who bought 160 acres of Kane County farmland not far from where the Ingallses settled, waxed lyrical over the rich productive soil, perfect for corn or wheat, and groves of oaks offering up raw material for cabins or fence rails: "In my opinion you could not find a better County in all the world for farming."
(Continues...)Excerpted from Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser. Copyright © 2017 Caroline Fraser. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Metropolitan Books; First Edition (November 21, 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 640 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1627792767
- ISBN-13 : 978-1627792769
- Item Weight : 1.95 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.41 x 1.57 x 9.61 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #42,644 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #13 in Children's Literary Criticism (Books)
- #156 in Author Biographies
- #328 in United States Biographies
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About the author
Caroline Fraser is the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning biography, "Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder", which also won a National Book Critics Circle award for biography, a Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune, and BIO's Plutarch Award. Her first book, "God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church," is now available in a 20th-Anniversary Edition with a new afterword. God's Perfect Child was selected as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Book Review Best Book. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, and Outside magazine, among others. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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House books.
The positives about this book: Carolyn Fraser didn’t excellent job researching the background of the Ingalls family and giving tidbits about their lives that I wasn’t aware of, such as the part that Freemasonry played in all of their lives. I also really enjoyed the deep dive into what was going on in America at the time - stuff I never learned in school but everyone should really know.
The not so positives about this book include Caroline Fraser’s personal biases which bleed clearly through the second half of the book. If her goal was to complete a character assassination towards Rose Wilder Lane, she succeeded! Her assessments seem unfair and unkind to call her “weird”. Rose may have been a very difficult person, and yet she is not alive to defend herself. How about giving her more credit for her pioneering work as a journalist and writer?
Fraser’s a liberal, who has no compunction about making statements such as “Socialism…helped” farmers on the 19th century frontier or portraying the New Deal solely in terms of compassion for the poor. That’s fine—she’s entitled to her political viewpoint. But it leads her into making omissions no competent historian would make, such as entirely ignoring the critique of the New Deal as a system of cartels for big business. This is a critique even liberals have acknowledged at least a little bit. The Progressive Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis agreed with it, striking down a major part of the New Deal in the 1936 Schechter Poultry case, for instance. But it appears nowhere in Fraser’s book.
That’s important because both Laura Wilder and Rose Lane were intense critics of the New Deal. Lane, particularly, is a major figure in the history of libertarianism. But Fraser never, in her 500+ pages, even attempts to address Lane’s substantive criticisms of the New Deal—even to refute them. Instead, she just asserts that “more discerning” people support government welfare—and she resolutely portrays Lane’s political views as a function of alleged mental illness. Thus we’re told that Lane wrote against the New Deal out of “a personal sense of grievance against the federal government,” or that she opposed FDR because “she found it easier to locate villains outside herself.”
This sort of psychologizing is simply infantile. No doubt Lane was a complex and cantankerous figure, perhaps even unlikeable. But to ascribe her political beliefs to that does a disservice not just to Lane, but to Wilder, who, after all, agreed with her daughter. Fraser recognizes this, so she is forced time and again to portray Wilder as having not REALLY believed in free markets and limited government, or of having somehow been duped by her daughter—which is a demeaning and fundamentally antifeminist perspective, not to mention flat-out wrong. Laura Wilder was no pushover. Fraser’s hostility to Lane transforms into misogyny, in fact; Lane was a remarkably modern figure—a world-traveling independent journalist who refused to compromise her career dreams to settle down to married life; she deserves recognition at least as one of the pioneering female intellectuals of the 20th century—yet Fraser manages to transform this into a character flaw that springs from Lane’s lack of a conscience and failure to act out stereotypically female versions of compassion. This, Fraser says, proves there was something wrong with her. No ’20s chauvinist could’ve said it better. (This is also false; Lane sponsored, at considerable personal expense, the educational and careers of several young people she “adopted” as her own. Fraser manages somehow to make this still more proof of her lack of charity.)
Fraser’s portrayal of opposition to the New Deal as a psychological disorder also does a disservice to those who believe the New Deal was a good idea. That’s because it’s not coupled with any substantive discussion or defense of the New Deal. That’s because it’s not coupled with any substantive discussion or defense of the New Deal. It makes no effort to address its merits, but rests upon an emotionalistic caricature of history, with good guy New Dealers against the Snidely Whipash capitalists. And that leads her into some real whoppers—such as when she quotes Rose Lane’s saying that “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty”—and then calls this a “nationalistic” statement, which is simply the opposite of the correct adjective, whatever one’s own opinion might be. Or her statement that the 1930s was “a time of the most widespread food insecurity Americans had ever known.” Assuming “food insecurity” means anything, surely Americans in, say, 1863 or 1837 or 1873 or 1620 faced worse, no? Or her statement that the Nineteenth Amendment “was the most important advance in civil rights in America since Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” So much for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875. She says that the Ingallses failed as homesteaders—a disputable claim—and then says their generation were essentially duped into homesteading because nobody could really have succeeded at it—also dubious—but then praises Progressive era banking laws that “would have provided a lifeline” to the Ingallses by giving them “low-interest loans”—after just telling us what terrible credit risks they were. And she even claims that “the Chicago tribune [in 1877] urged homeowners pestered by [the homeless] to spike handouts with ‘a little strychnine or arsenic’ and poison men as if they were vermin.” This is just not true. That article was a satire. But because it supports her cartoonish sterotypes of the Gilded Age, she falls for a hoax.
As for historical issues of greater subtlety, they’re far beyond Fraser’s ken. She criticizes Lane for giving Mussolini and Hitler some measured approval in the 1920s and early 30s—ignoring the fact that many conservatives did so, including Winston Churchill. Hardly proof she was a fascist. She praises Laura Wilder for saying that “If I had been the Indians I would have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left [the prairie],” by saying that this “was a startling statement for a woman of her day.” It wasn’t. Such sentimentalism and romanticism—which was certainly well-grounded—was commonplace throughout Wilder’s lifetime and before; see the works of James Fenimore Cooper, for instance.
Her vendetta against Lane also blinds her to BIOGRAPHICAL issues of greater subtlety. Time and again she condemns Lane (and more gently, Wilder) for introducing false or inaccurate anecdotes into their writing—most notably the anecdote about Almanzo narrowly escaping the notorious Bender family of serial killers. But she never addresses the way in which people tell family stories over the years. Families tell stories back and forth over the years and often forget what actually did happen; they don’t always double check their records for factual accuracy. Over generations, these tales evolve and expand, and become treasured, so that they become “lore.” We’ve all seen this happen. Maybe Wilder and Lane knew that the Bender story wasn’t true, but it’s also possible that these tales were told back and forth for so long that they became lore, and they themselves didn’t know what was true or not. In the 1930s, Laura openly said it wasn’t true. But the 50s, did she even remember this? Maybe, maybe not—and Fraser makes no effort to address this. She simply takes the fact that it wasn’t true as proof of Rose’s dishonesty. (The fact that Laura also repeated the story? That’s just proof of Rose’s nefarious influence.)
This sort of sloppiness—even cattiness—ruins the book, which degenerates into a redundant, superficial, attack on Lane and on the libertarian political movement in general. That’s nothing new to libertarians, of course—always the red-headed stepchild—but it’s so poorly done that it not only fails to persuade, but it ends up as neither a satisfying biography nor a satisfying critique of the ideas. I mean, for example, on pages 498-99, she criticizes, of all things, Rose Wilder Lane’s GRAVESTONE—which includes a passage from Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice—for being written in all capital letters. Seriously, she calls this “shouting,” and then says that her dear friend who chose the words, Roger Lea MacBride, “and conservatives like him,” “had not read” Agrarian Justice, which, she says, was an argument in favor of a welfare state. Even putting aside the petty nastiness of such comments, and this dubious characterization of Agrarian Justice, and her misrepresentation of MacBride as a conservative, when he was actually a libertarian, what proof does Fraser have that MacBride and Lane didn’t read Agrarian Justice? She certainly doesn’t provide any.
This book features page after page of such millimeter-deep partisanship.
What it ultimately is, is a failure of imagination. Fraser just can’t CONCEIVE of how someone could have opposed the New Deal in the 30s, and thinks it must just prove that Rose hated poor people, was mentally ill, and didn’t know anything about history (and that she manipulated or brainwashed her otherwise independent-thinking mom). What it really proves is that Fraser doesn’t know, and doesn’t care to learn, about the context of the subject she’s writing about or to understand Laura Wilder or Rose Lane as they understood themselves. That’s a disservice to them and to the reader—and it’s a disappointment, because we all deserve better.
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Passages using pronouns such as, she said such and such to her, sometimes leaves the reader in doubt as to who is talking to whom.
Bellissimo.
j'ai commandé ce livre récemment paru aux Etats-Unis, car fan depuis toujours de la série La petite Maison dans la Prairie, j'avais été quand même surprise de savoir que dans les livres écrits par Laura Ingalls, il n'y avait pas d'Albert ni de mariage de Mary Ingalls. j'ai donc décidé d'en savoir plus et suis tombée dans un premier temps sur Pioneer Girl, le recueil de souvenirs réellement écrit par Laura, sans les corrections réalisées ensuite par sa fille Rose. Le style est lapidaire, peu enjolivé et franchement rebutant; Mais ce sont les vrais souvenirs de Laura Ingalls jusqu'à son mariage avec Almanzo Wilder.
Dans Prairie Fires, uniquement disponible en anglais, comme tous les ouvrages consacrés à la vraie vie de Laura , l'auteur raconte également l'histoire des pionniers en général. et aussi l'histoire des états du Minnesota, du Dakota et comment les amérindiens ont du sans cesse céder leurs terres, à cause des errements d'Abraham Lincoln. Je suis à la moitié du livre, et le mot qui revient sans cesse dans mon esprit est Pauvreté.
Je recommande néanmoins ce livre pour tous les amoureux de la famille Ingalls, la vraie, et pour ceux qui veulent en savoir plus sur la vie des pionniers. Bémol évidemment, le livre n'est pas traduit, ça ne me pose pas de problème, mais tout le monde ne lit pas l'anglais, et ce serait quand même mieux si une traduction était envisagée.