Little House: The Remarkable Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder Long before she became the beloved author of the *Little House* books, Laura Ingalls Wilder lived a life shaped by movement, hardship, family, work, loss, and remarkable change. Born in Wisconsin in 1867, Laura grew up in a nation still being transformed by westward settlement. Her childhood carried her from the woods of Wisconsin to Kansas and Minnesota, and eventually to Dakota Territory, where she witnessed the building of new communities on the prairie. She became a teacher while still a teenager, married Almanzo Wilder at eighteen, endured crop failures, illness, the death of a child, financial uncertainty, and years of difficult farming, before finally establishing a lasting home at Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. But Laura’s story did not end with pioneer life. Decades after the experiences of her childhood, she began transforming her memories into literature. At sixty-five, she published "Little House in the Big Woods, launching a series that would introduce generations of readers to a memorable literary vision of the American frontier. Yet the woman behind those books was more complicated than the fictionalized child readers came to know. *Little House: The Remarkable Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder* looks beyond the familiar stories to examine the life that inspired them—the teacher, farm woman, mother, journalist, wife, and author who lived for ninety years of extraordinary American change. The book also explores the complicated process by which memory became literature, including Laura’s autobiographical manuscript *Pioneer Girl* and the important editorial and publishing role played by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. It considers what the *Little House* books preserve, what they alter or leave out, and how historical evidence can help us understand the difference between Laura’s lived experience and the literary world she created. This is not simply the story of the little girl readers remember. It is the story of the woman who grew up, endured, worked, wrote, remembered—and ultimately transformed her own past into one of the most enduring literary legacies in American culture. Behind the Little House was a real woman. This is her story.
