Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser

For my True Books 2020 read this month, I decided to go back to the Little House on the Prairie with Caroline Fraser's Prairie Fires. This biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago, and was selected as one of the ten best books of 2017 by the New York Times. All of this pointed to it being one heck of a read, which was good, because I had a lot of questions after I finished reading the Little House series last month. I wanted to know if the various plotlines and characters from the stories were actually true, why Wilder decided to write the books, and how the oddly dark final novel in the series, The First Four Years, came to be published. Its length and tiny print was a little bit daunting, but I went into my reading excited to see what I would learn.

The novel begins with Laura's parents, Charles and Caroline Ingalls. They are, or course, the real-life counterparts to Ma and Pa from the Little House books. As such, Fraser spends a fair amount of time discussing their backgrounds and lives. Eventually, they settle into a little house in Wisconsin and begin having their children, the second of which is Laura. The novel is just over 500 pages long, and the first 170 or so detail Wilder's life up through the end of what is depicted in her book series, which encompasses her childhood, adolescence, and young adult life after she marries Almanzo and has her daughter, Rose. The events described do resemble what she would go on to write about years later, but there are clear differences. People are added or omitted along the way, including another sibling that died as a baby, events are out of order, ages are fudged, and some places the family lived and worked along their journey are excised completely. There is more darkness, hardship, and struggle. While there were certainly moments of joy, Wilder's life was very difficult. Fraser does an excellent job reconstructing this and takes the time to point out the similarities and differences that would appear later in her novels along the way. 

The rest of the book mostly concerns Laura's continued struggles with trying to establish a functioning farm in the Midwest, her complex relationship with her growing daughter, her decision to begin writing (first for newspapers and magazines, then for children), and how her life changed as she became a highly-regarded author. I was surprised to discover as I was reading that this part of the story was actually much more interesting than the adventurous, pioneering parts of her life that she would became famous for writing about. Her journey from farm wife to author was fraught with struggle and heartache, and the many conflicts she engaged in with her daughter throughout the writing process were fascinating to read about. Fraser also delves into her evolving political views, which were deeply affected by the social programs FDR attempted to implement to help farmers on the prairie during the Great Depression. Unsurprisingly, Laura's hardworking background gave her a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" type of mentality, and she would come to loathe the New Deal programs intended to provide aid. She became deeply conservative as a result, and slipped bits and pieces of her political philosophy into her writing. It was interesting to learn about how the politics and issues of the day influenced her personal beliefs and her writing. The novel ends, of course, with her eventual death and an exploration of what happened to her works afterwards, including how the famous TV series came to be.

Every aspect of the work felt meticulously well-researched and presented and I liked it a lot. I enjoyed Fraser's writing style and pacing, as well as the handful of pictures she included in the text. Biographies usually have some dry stretches, and Prairie Fires is no exception, but the majority of the work held my interest and was very enjoyable. I was delighted to see that all of the questions I had at the beginning of the novel were answered, and much more interesting information that I had no idea about was included as well.  

The most interesting part of the story for me was Wilder's strange relationship with her daughter Rose. The little baby I last saw toddling around on the prairie in The First Four Years turned out to be a bit of a wild child. She stepped away from her family's farm as soon as she was old enough to move to the city and became a writer. She started making a bit of money with stories for magazines, and encouraged her mother to give writing a try. Wilder, struggling with debts and worried about Almanzo's increasingly poor health, agreed to give it a shot. After years of writing for magazines successfully, she began the Little House Series. Rose acted as her editor, extensively rewriting sections to soften them and add interest. The correspondence that survives between the pair reveals that Rose was responsible for pretty extensive revisions, to the point where some Wilder scholars question how much of the manuscripts were from Laura versus Rose. They also show that the stories are firmly in the historical fiction genre, despite Wilder's lifelong assertion that every word of her series was true.

While Rose was acting as her mother's editor, her behavior became increasingly strange. She was romantically linked to a handful of men, she published a few biographies of famous people that were full of fabricated details, she became obsessed with Albania, she informally adopted a few orphan boys, declared herself a Muslim, and spent an irresponsible amount of money buying and renovating a series of houses. She also completely mined her mother's life for writing ideas, publishing a series of stories essentially plagiarized from her mother's manuscripts. Throughout all this, she fought and made up with her mother repeatedly. They needed each other to survive financially, but struggled to maintain a healthy relationship. They dynamic between the pair was endlessly fascinating and it's worth reading the novel for alone.

Reading Prairie Fires made the Little House novels come to life in a way that just reading the books themselves didn't for me. Knowing how the series was created and what Laura Ingalls Wilder's life was actually like put the whole series in a different perspective. Life on the prairie was indescribably difficult, but their were some joys along the way. The series showed the joys. It's a reflection of what Wilder held close to her heart in a tough world. This novel showed the truth. The combination of the two made for a really nice reading experience. I would definitely encourage anyone interested in the Little House books to give this novel a try.


Challenge Tally
True Books 2020: 7/14


Total Books Read in 2020: 34