little house on the prairie by laura ingalls wilder

Wilder’s silent collaborator in all of them was her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane-a famous writer in her time and a key early organizer of the libertarian political movement starting in the 1930s. The Little House books, still in print with HarperCollins, began with Little House in the Big Woods and ended with These Happy Golden Years. They helped lay the groundwork for the modern libertarian strain of modern conservatism-and to an extent few people realize, they helped fund its rise. During the writing of each new book, as the series expanded in answer to the fans’ clamors for more, the Little House books became anti-New Deal political parables.

Woven into the story of Laura’s life were then-new ideas about the value of individual freedom, unfettered markets and limited government. The Little House books, conceived during the Great Depression as a family project to honor the nation’s tough old pioneers, blossomed during the writing into something else. In modern America they also seem like escapism-a welcome relief from the welter and conflict of today’s politics. Both in the books and the popular TV show “Little House on the Prairie,” the Wilder family stories have become perhaps our most iconic portraits of the optimism and self-reliance of the frontier.

She courageously helps her family fight fires, blizzards and drought she helps bring in the cows, dress a blackbird for supper and twist hay for the cookstove. The saga tells of a pioneer girl’s itinerant childhood traveling in covered wagons and starting new farms across the prairies-from Wisconsin to American Indian lands, Minnesota and Dakota Territory.

Her new book, Libertarians on the Prairie, about the mother-daughter collaboration that created the Little House series, was released this month by Arcade Publishing.įor 84 years, American kids have been growing up with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s inspiring Little House books, reading brave tales of survival on the prairies in the 19 th century. Christine Woodside is a writer who also edits the journal Appalachia.

Little house on the prairie by laura ingalls wilder